With all of the excitement with Africa Day students were gearing up for the annual African experience at Bushey Meads. Students had the opportunity to partake in an array of different sessions from African Drumming to creating their own batik using different stencils. The drumming session was great to see as students learnt about the different drums which are used in different countries in Africa and their importance in African culture. Students learnt how to use a drum to create their own beat and worked together to create a series of drum beats together.

The Batik sessions which took place in C2 and C4 allowed students to create their own African styled adinkra prints. Students learnt that this is how traditional art from some African countries is created. They were encouraged to think about particular shapes, symbols and objects which are synonymous with Africa and include them in their design. There were an array of ideas from lions and tigers to pictures of villages and the savanna. It was great to see students take into consideration artistic ideas from an African perspective.

Students had a Video Link session where they got to choose one of the 54 countries. From their choice they could look at different areas of a person’s life such as education and communications, map of the country, education, people and culture etc. They had to collate all of their findings and put them into a presentation which they would need for the evaluation section in the final section. It was interesting to see the different countries which students chose such as Madagascar, Uganda, Ghana and how much they learnt about them as pairs.

Following on from last year, students had the opportunity to participate in African Dance which went down a treat. Students were shown different dance moves from both East and West African cultures. It was pleasing to see that all the students who took part learnt something, I would also like to shout out to all the boys who got really into this session and showed the girls a few new moves! I think their inner African selves came out really well.

The final session of the day for most students they got to reflect over all of the activities which they took part in and created a Tik-Tok post or Instagram post. It was nice to see even at the end of the day students still very enthused about the day and the different countries they had learnt about, not to mention some of the new dance moves which they can now add to their repertoire of moves.

Students overall had a great day and got to experience different aspects of African culture. I would like to take the opportunity to thank all of the teachers who helped make the day a success (especially the Art and Technology Faculty for the adinkra printing).

Kale and see you next year!