Inspiration Africa! Telegraph Hill School Introduction day

INSPIRATION AFRICA!
Project 9
INTRODUCTION DAY

Year 9 at Telegraph Hill School

The introduction day at Telegraph Hill secondary school began with Viv showing Year 9 the handling collection from the Horniman Museum's African Worlds collection.

"... then Viv brought the costumes out. People started dressing up in them and then they took a photo of them all dressed up."
WWW submission form - Year 9 pupil

Following this the pupils and team moved to the Drama room where Olusola and Tony introduced the project keyword - SPIRIT - which would provide the theme of their project. Sola started by reciting a poem based around "You see me, I am somebody, I have spirit" and then the whole class had a brainstorming session around being somebody.

I am somebody because of:

where I come from

my personality

my confidence

my attitude

my family

my friends

my faith

my religion

my belief in myself

They then split up into small groups to write words or sentences around being somebody and to write acrostic poems using their keyword - SPIRIT.

"Today we learnt about spirit and what makes a different person. We made an acrostic poem about spirit and the type of words we used were soul, personality, thoughts, intelligence and respect."
WWW submission form - Year 9 pupil

Soul is your inner beauty or darkness
Personality makes you what you are
Intelligence, integrity, that's what makes you human
Respect yourself, others and mother earth
Identity is a cultural thing, it represents who you are
Trust yourself and life, you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone

Read more SPIRIT acrostic poems (please use your browser back button to return to this page - do not use the Close button)

"We are somebody because of the way we dress and the way we speak. We are somebody because of our attitude towards people and the way we act and react. We are somebody because of our different personalities. We are somebody because of our religion and colour, the way we think and the way we believe in ourselves. The last thing is the way we are built. SPIRIT means alcohol and somebody's soul."

After break Year 9 moved into the computer suite where Jacqui showed them the Inspiration Africa! website. There are 18 pcs in this suite which meant that the majority of pupils had a computer to themselves. After looking at some of the work from the previous projects and the key objects in the virtual library, pupils were asked to send a message from the website about what they had experienced so far in the day.

"I have learnt about instuments from other cultural backgrounds such as the talking drum, gong, antelope horn trumpet. Learning about other cultures is a real inspiration."

"I think this morning was great - learning about different cultures. I liked the African rhythms."

"... we looked at masks - the names of the masks are Mende masks. Some people tried it on ..."

"We had to write down what makes a person, we wrote down what we thought spirit means. We related it to ourselves because we were picking put different things about each other. Then I looked at the Sandhurst web page because it was my old school and I wanted to find out what it looked like." (project 2).
Excerpts from WWW submission forms - Year 9 pupils

After lunch it was time to start screen printing the introductory day banner. Everyone gathered around the table to watch Tony introducing the process and screen printing equipment before cutting out their Inspiration Africa! SPIRIT shape (these are used as stencils and so any detail in the image must be carefully cut out).

Some pupils then hand-painted the background to the banner using warm colours ready for the shapes to be positioned and over-printed using two cold colours.