Year 5 children visited the African Worlds Exhibition at the Horniman Museum on the morning of Friday, 9th June.

The session began with Viv (from the Horniman Museum Education Department) talking to the children about their key object, the ijele mask.

The Igbo in Nigeria are a people who believe very strongly in their tradition and culture and enact their world view through rituals, ceremonies, dance and music.

In Achalla in South Eastern Nigeria the family of Ichie Ezennaya has a long history of building ijele masquerade costumes for the community. (read more background information).

The children asked questions about the different images on the mask before writing their immediate reactions to the ijele on worksheets:

happy... colourful... joyful... MASSIVE... makes me feel like an ant... symbolic... expensive... amazing.

The children then looked at the rest of the African Worlds exhibition, picked out and drew a favourite mask, found patterns on many different items and searched the display for objects that symbolised PRIDE.

At the end of the session the children took the words IJELE and PRIDE and wrote 'acrostic' class poems.

Interesting in many ways

Joyful as can be

Enormous like an elephant

Lovely as a butterfuly

Entrancing and beautiful -
it's good enough for me