Day 1 with Year 5 began with introductions using rhythmic name games which was followed by Viv showing a range of different masks, fabrics and musical instruments from the Horniman Museum's handling collection.

After this Ayo, who is a drummer and story-teller from Nigeria, introduced the children to the talking drum, explaining the phonetic nature of the Yoruba languages and its 3 pitches - low, middle and high. Using his name as an example, he played it on the talking drum.

He then introduced his Jembe drum and explained the importance of the cowbell in maintaining the main rhythm - changing it when required. The class learnt a call and response song and heard about it's history by way of a story.

Next Viv introduced a session where the children worked in pairs writing stories around particular objects from the handling collection. Using their imaginations they named the object, wrote about how it might have been made and how it made it's trip to England.

Some of the pupils read their wonderful stories out aloud. If you would like to read a selection, please click on one of the following links and use your browser back button to return to this page.

The Greedy King
The Magical Cloth
The Tale of the Horn
The Upside Down Drum

Finally before lunch Ayo talked about the importance of names in Yoruba culture, his own name means "Joy comes to me" and he explained why he was called this.

He then told the story of the Tortoise and the Elephant. Stories in Nigeria are used to teach children about life and each have many meanings. At the end of the story Year 5 guessed what this one was about:

"Don't pay too much attention to strangers", "Even if you are very small you can achieve great things", "Pride comes before a fall". They then talked about PRIDE and how it can have both negative and positive aspects.

IN THE AFTERNOON

In the afternoon the pupils were introduced to the screen printing process and it's tools - the screen and squeegee - by Tony.

They then talked about pride and cut out shapes of things that they were proud of, these included: their mothers, families, minds, bodies and favourite sports. These were printed onto their large class banner - details of which are shown right and left.

During the screen printing session, pupils took it in turns to access the Inspiration Africa! website, in groups of 4, on the classroom pc.

Jacqui explained the site to them and showed them examples of the previous projects. They learnt about links and also posed for the digital camera, saw their pictures on its LED and understood how these pictures were to be transferred to a computer and added to this web page!

The day finished with more singing with Ayo and a group photo surrounding their completed PRIDE class banner.

The next morning the pupils visited the Horniman Museum.

The introduction day was also supported by Sheila and Ros (Outreach workers from the Horniman Museum Education Department) and observed by Kevin Mathieson (Arts Advisor and artist currently evaluating INSPIRATION AFRICA!

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