Liss Junior School – Liss: Year 6

Wants & Needs initial discussions

A large part of the first week of a new school year in Yr 6 is an examination of wants and needs and how it plays a part in our lives.

Rowan Class started their study by being placed into table groups. Each group was then giventhe outline of a child before being asked to give their child a name. Next the group were allowed 10 minutes to write on post – its as many things that the child would need in order to grow up happy and healthy. At this point they were asked to stop.

The next task the children were given was to start removing post – its that they felt were the least important. Initially, this was to leave only the twenty most important post – its then removing five at a time until they were left with the five post -its that they felt were most important.

Among the most important considerations the children came up with was education, a family, clean water/sanitation, nutritious food, recuperative sleep and exercise.

Mr Stanley then gave the pupils 20 wants and needs cards and the same type of exercise was repeated. The children worked together to get down to the five most important cards to them by removing 5 cards at a time. As they gained more understanding of some of the statements, the discussions became a bit more heated. What became clear was that the children were making a distinction between wants and needs:

Needs – the things that are absolutely necessary for all children to have or be able to do to live a happy and healthy life

Wants – the things that are nice to have but are not necessary for a full life.

When the groups shared their final 5 post-its there, was some similarities between what they had originally selected for their child, but there was also some differences. Nutritious food, shelter, medical care and sanitation were the most popular, but there were some changes to what the children considered most important. The right to express opinions, the freedom to practice their own culture and religion, and protection from abuse an neglect were all very important. This is quite possibly a recognition of things we value from living in a democracy.

We then compared what our pupils had shared with that of Kafuro pupils the last time they carried out this exercise. There was a good deal of commonality in that Kafuro pupils felt that shelter, nutritious food and clean water were really important. Where there was a difference was that Ugandan children valued clothing and land really highly. In Uganda, particularly where there are rural communities, having land to grow crops on is highly important. When your family’s livelihood is dependent upon harvesting and selling those crops, then everything else pales into insignificance. Likewise, for some children, they might only have a couple of sets of clothes (one of which is their school uniform). Therefore we can see how depending on your circumstances, your needs may change slightly.

In the next post, we will look at how the UN Convention on the rights of the child is centred around needs.

Wants & Needs work with Year 6 at Liss

Greetings to all of our friends in Kafuro. We have heard that there is the possibility of P7 returning to school on September 20^th. We hope that this works out and that you are able to resume your learning before Primary Leaving Examinations.

Year 6 at Liss Junior School have begun their work on the wants and needs learning that takes place in the UK every year and allows us to make some comparisons with Kafuro.

Our first task was to give each pair of children the outline of a child and to give the outlined child a name. Next, we discussed what this child would need to grow up into a happy and healthy adult. The children were set the task of identifying twenty things that would help the child achieve this. At this point there was no input and the children could completely decide for themselves.

Once the pupils had completed their twenty things that a child would need, they wrote them on post its and placed them in the middle of the child. Next, they were asked to remove five of the things that the child could do without – this reduced the items to fifiteen. This exercise was repeated twice more and generated a lot of debate on each table as the children argued over what should stay. Eventually, each group had five items left which they shared with the rest of the class and compared.

Our next step was to introduce UNICEF wants and needs cards and perform a similar exercise. However, firstly the children were asked to divide the cards into three groups: those they thought were Most Important, Important and Least Important. Then, once again, Mr Stanley asked the pupils to reduce the cards down to just five, and the classroom became very animated as the children had to make some very difficult decisions over what should stay and what should go. It was interesting to see how the children made their choices compared with previous years. Although there were a lot of similarities, there were also some notable differences. This will be shared in a future blog post.

Once the pupils had completed this exercise, they compared the five wants and needs they had left with the post its they had created in the previious lesson. As a class, we then discussed the difference between wants and needs.

Needs: the things that are absolutely necessary for all children to have a happy and healthy life

Wants:the things that are nice to have but not necessary for a full life.

We finished this first session by discussing some key questions: Are wants and needs different for people in the UK and Uganda? Why don’t all children in the world have what they need?

To the first question, the pupils were quite clear that needs would be the same in both countries. However, there was an acknowledgement that wants would be different. For example, a pupil in the UK might want a Playstation or an Xbox, but for a pupil in Uganda, where electricity is scarce in places, a new bike would be something that they might really want. We were able to use Eben’s expertise as he was able to tell us that growing up in Malawi there were often power cuts, so what was the point of having a console?

The pupils were y not shocked that children in the world didn’t have everything they need. We discussed some of the reasons why this may be so:

War
Some countries don’t have enough money to feed people
Some governments are corrupt
Exploitation of poorer countries by richer countries
Climate change

There was widespread disbelief in the class that millions of people go hungry in the world when there is more than enough food to feed everyone comfortably.

Next, the pupils looked at the needs of children are protected. We studied the United Nations Charter for the rights of the Child. It was interesting to see the children make links with their work in the first session. One group were delighted to see that the right to play was enshrined in their convention and felt that justified them placing ‘play’ in their final five cards.

In our next session we will be trying to marry up each need from the first session with other rights in the charter.

Sanitation Assembly at Liss

Today, Rowan Class presented their assembly about sanitation to the pupils and parents of Liss. This encompassed of all the work that we have carried out this term as well as showing how we have worked together with our friends at Kafuro Primary School to improve sanitation there through the water pipeline and refurbished toilets. The assembly also introduced Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This is something that we teach implicitly at Liss, but now need to make far more explicit. Below you can download the PowerPoint of our assembly.

http://kafuroliss.primaryblogger.co.uk/files/2020/02/Sanitation-assembly-5.2.2020-2.pptx

Pizza sale with Liss tomatoes

On Friday, Rowan Class pupils at Liss held a pizza sale using many of the tomatoes tthat last year’s Rowan Class had grown in the bottle greenhouse. Mr Stanley cooked down the tomatoes and added onion before blitzing it into a sauce. He then made a pizza dough and cooked pizzas in the cob oven. The children quickly sold out of the pizzas on the layground but not before raising £30 (150,000UGX) towards completing the new classroom at Kafuro.

Ugandan-style food tasting

For our Year 6 DT project this term, the children will be designing, making and eating a Ugandan-style meal. The children have already carried out some research on the internet about popular Ugandan foods, but today Mr Stanley prepared some Ugandan food for the children to taste. The food included:

Roast potatoes – In Uganda these are known as Irish potatoes

Sweet potatoes – some of our Ugandan friends refer to them as sweat potatoes

Beef muchomo – pieces of beef marinated in oil, garlic and mild curry powder grilled to perfection.

Plantain chips – Green banana chips lightly salted.

Salad – red onion, carrot & cabbage

Chapatti – made from flour, water with a tiny pinch of salt.

Katchembali – another salad with tomato, green pepper, onion and chilli.

The children took the opportunity to taste all the foods. They then had to complete an evaluation form giving each food a mark out of ten and explaining why they awarded the mark. Next, the children will have to design their own Ugandan plate of food covering the major food groups.

We would like to ask our Ugandan friends what British food would they like to eat?

Using Maths to raise money

On Friday, Rowan Class made cakes to raise money for kitchen equipment for our friends at our twinned school, Kafuro Primary School. But this was no ordinary cooking lesson. Mr Stanley gave the children basic recipe cards and then the children had to use ratio to scale the recipes to the amount of cakes that were required. The children had to use multiplication and division skills to correctly scale the ingredients. Only then were they allowed to go to the kitchen and start baking. Once again the children had to measure out the ingredients accurately using scales.

When all the children had finished baking, 98 cupcakes had been made that were sold on the playground as part of ‘Treat Friday.’ The cakes sold out very quickly!

We would like to ask our friends at Kafuro whether they have done any follow up baking since Mr Stanley and Mrs Green visited in July and August. Has Gloria set up her own baking school?

Sports Day 2016

It was that day again! The 2016 version of Liss Junior School Sports Day had an opening ceremony and a Mexican wave built in. The competition was as fierce as ever with the red team narrowly winning from the yellows. Congratulations to everyone who took part and thanks to Mrs Meredith for organising such a successful event.

Photos of Class AS in action are below

Working with the rangers

On Friday 15^th April, Liss Junior School had a school grounds day and Freya, Jade, Katie and Imogen from Class AS were chosen to go to the pond area and work with the rangers from Queen Elizabeth Country Park. First, we went up onto the field. Here, we met Joe who told us about birdhouses and we helped him put it up. Then we went over to the pond and looked in the weeds for water creatures. Zen and Rebecca were clearing out the pond with rakes. We found lots of creatures for example: Ramshorn snail, water louse, pond snail and some sort of grub. We also met some newts. We picked them up and looked at them carefully. One of them played dead on Jade’s hand to make me put him down. Zen then told us lots about all the creatures we had found.

She told us about how plants and animals live in the pond and told us about how if they didn’t rake everything out the plants would take over and “choke the pond!”. She also said that if we made a new pond all the newts and everything would transfer to that one.

Afterwards, we went to show the rangers around the school field and they were very impressed with our bug hotel. Unfortunately, Mr Stanley remembered we were on the field and came to get us. Here are some facts we learnt:

A baby bee is a larvae
Plants can take over a whole pond
There is a spiky plant called a soldier plant
There is such thing as a water scorpion
You have to have wet hands to hold a newt without gloves

The new birdboxes

A newt

Raking the school pond

A soldier plant

Letters from Kafuro

One of the many tasks that Yowasi and Molly carried out on their visit to the UK was to bring letters from the children at Kafuro Primary School to their peers in their twinned classes at Liss. Mr Stanley distributed them all and on Tuesday Class AS were given letters from P7 which, as the photos clearly show, the children enjoyed reading. One of the key messages in the letters was how much the children in Kafuro value the blog and look forward to posts from Liss.

The children at Liss will obviously reply ahead of a proposed visit in July.

Yowasi comes home!

Today was another very special day at Liss Junior School as Yowasi came back to Liss Junior School after an absence of two years. He met with some of the children he remembered from his last visit before going with a group of Year 4 children, Mr Burford and Dave Catlin from Valiant Technology for a roamer demonstration. Regular readers of this blog will remember that in the summer Mr Stanley and Mrs Green took a roamer out to Kafuro where it was a smash hit. The children showed Yowasi how to play to play golf with a roamer and also to program it to go around barriers. Dave also presented Yowasi with two more roamers for Kafuro Primary School so that more children will be able to experience programming.

Yowasi spent the rest of the morning in Class AS observing a poetry lesson and then giving a question and answer session. In the afternoon he gave a presentation to Class AS before taking the class down to the music and drama room and teaching them a Ugandan cultural dance. This was lots of fun as the photos below show. In fact after afternoon break word had spread around the school and Class KB wanted to learn how to perform a cultural dance as well.

A big topic of conversation between Yowasi and the pupils in Class AS was how much the children in Kafuro look forward to our blog posts and want to learn about their friends in England. Yowasi encouraged the children to comment on these posts and to ask questions.

Finally, Yowasi spent the last session of the day learning how the children create stop frame animation programs using I can animate. He was very impressed with the results.

Yowasi will be visiting school again on Thursday morning before heading to Heathrow to fly home to Uganda after a busy two weeks.