Inviting friends to help bring History alive!

int-school-ed-week-mar-2015 (3)Our Year 5 and 6 School Councils Reps were lucky enough to attend a special Education Week ‘Living History’ activity afternoon at another local school yesterday.

Our visit was both  informative and entertaining; a fun afternoon of learning – that truly brought our TCI history and culture to life!

Through this blog post we hope that teachers, classes and families will share in our experiences.  The children also hope to report back to all of our students about their visit in an assembly time, too.

Our thanks to the staff and students of the International School of the Turks and Caicos who gave us such a warm welcome.

So read on to see all the activities we got to do…

Four hands on activity centres were set up for the students and visitors to rotate through, focusing on Native Indians, Culture, Salt Rakers and Pirates.

In the Native Indian area there were craft and jewellery making activities.  We also got to try our hands at making an axe from local wood and bits of conch shell – it was trickier than it looked!
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In the culture area we decorated Maskanoo masks and helped to make costumes.
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“Making the maskanoo costume was my favourite activity because I enjoyed the challenge of attaching the vibrant coloured strips of material to the costume.”
We then went on to a very entertaining presentation by David Bowen, who showed us samples of early Caribbean musical instruments, as well as the ones used today to create TCI’s very own, ‘Rake and Scrape’ music. We were treated to an impromptu concert, when Mr. Bowen performed a local dance and played some of the instruments, including the rip saw and harmonica.
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Our last stop was the salt harvesting tables, where water trays sat drying out in the sun, leaving behind residues of the popular seasoning. We practiced sifting salt to remove any yucky bits and decorated the National Costume with coloured wool that matched the colour that represents each island.
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 “The Salt Raking activities made us really think about how hard work this must have been for Salt Rakers to do all day in the hot sun in the past.”
The children also helped paint a wall mural of the islands and helped to plant a cotton plant in the school garden area.
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“We thoroughly enjoyed helping to paint the map on the wall; it was really fun!”
Sadly, the time went very quickly and we didn’t get the chance to visit the Pirate area to create wanted posters for infamous buccaneers – maybe next year!
 “Thank you to all the teachers and volunteers for helping us to experience life in the past through such a fun afternoon.”
It was lovely for students and teachers of different local schools to connect and share their learning together; there was a real community feel. Another example of these community links is our Team AWESOME Club, which links students from different schools with sporting activities. We hope that more of these kinds of events can be planned in the future and that more of our children can be involved, next time.

Comments

  1. Katie Hinks says:

    Thank you for coming. The children really enjoyed having visitors.
    I very much agree in terms of working collaboratively and hope we can continue to do more together in the future.
    Best wishes,
    Katie Hinks

  2. Miss Sian says:

    :-)))))))

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