Class AS – The Kafuro & Liss Blog

SUCCESS TO YOU OUR FRIENDS.

Dear our friends at Liss Junior School, we bless you for the strong hearts and hard work.

We are very sure that you will continue to be very useful and important citizens to this ” Global Village”

We need to think about keeping track of all our friends at Liss and Kafuro, this is important as we are to work together in making the World a better place.
For example, you are visiting Uganda in the near future and you need to visit Kafuro through our organisation and tracking, this becomes easy and you get to enjoy the services. and many other reasons……

Our prayers and best wishes go to our friends in year six doing their SATS, we are confident in you and trust that teachers and parents have done greatly to set you in passing all your tests.

Our prayers and lovely wishes for your success.
God bless you abundantly.

Hello everyone

This term our class, Primary Seven, had to complete their final examinations in the first week of November. Our class had 27 students with the number of boys that of girls. We wait for their results by mid January.

Our class, Primary Five, has been studying about The Internet, new words like Delete, search, sort, sign in, surf, Google and Others were taught to us.

We have been Lucky to have Liss Junior School as our friends, with their help, our lesson was very practical because we used our computers to search for different things such as when one on our classmates asked to see the image of God. We all felt very scared but our teacher allowed him to type what he asked for into Google. It took a long time as we waited anxiously for the images to appear. This was due to our poor network. Explaining about the nature of our network, Yowasi said that the network will be OK, with time, as it goes with the level of development of the area. He further explained that internet and information are considered basic needs among developed countries and asked us to mention some on the countries we thought in the statement. We told him countries like England, America Germany and others but a few in Africa like Libya. S. Africa and Other.
Talking about Uganda’s last move to provide free internet to people in Kampala, we looked at the government not being fair as most of the people in town can afford internet and have good network meaning the government should care much about villages which have no proper network and cannot afford internet.

We also learnt how to type and send electronic mails, these machines called computers can move messages to different places in just a blink of an eye.

Primary Six studied about peace and security, this was equally important for the whole school that an assembly was necessary. Primary Six class presented different articles of news about security and insecurity happenings in Uganda. Most hurting was hearing about how people kill each other for just nothing and in addition thieves in the village who steal people’s property and gardens in Kafuro were also mentioned.

It was clearly stated that peace and security facilitates living in harmony and it is fundamental for our development.
By the end of the assembly, all the school pupils had understood that peace and security is not one person’s role but a role we all have to participate in. PEACE STARTS WITH ME.

A busy day at Liss

Thanks to Moris and P6 for their post. It is good to know that your bees are doing well although we’re sure you would prefer to have all six hives populated by colonies. Here in Liss, the long cold winter has only just ended and we have unfortunately lost two colonies through the cold weather. However, we checked our third colony (the original) this morning and the bees were very active out foraging for food. The pleasing news is that the weather is finally becoming warmer so we are expecting the colony to thrive and hope that we can take a swarm from the colony to populate a second hive later in the year.

We are also pleased to hear that Community Ranger, Elinah will be taking regular assemblies at Kafuro. Today, our community ranger, Joe took assembly at Liss and told us all about animals in Uganda and the UK. We learned how a female weaver bird can destroy a nest made by her mate with just one snip of her beak if she doesn’t like it.

We also continued building our bottle greenhouse today. Mr Stanley and two pupils turned and raked the soil in the greenhouse and made sure it was level while our site manager, Mr Haycock had a very difficult job trying to fit the door. The problem was that the wood had warped over the winter so poor Mr Haycock had to keep making adjustments. With only half the roof to fit, we are confident that the bottle greenhouse will be finished tomorrow.

Finally, we are able to tell you that our solar panels have now saved three cubic tonnes of carbon dioxide. We are looking forward to raising the rest of the money required to provide Kafuro with solar panels so that you can use a clean source of energy as well.

Joe talking to the children during assembly

Our Solar display showing we have now saved three cubic tonnes of carbon dioxide

Bottle greenhouse nears completion

Work on the bottle greenhouse has been continuing this week with Mr Haycock, ably assisted by Ashleigh, Tegan and Violet from Class AS, Three sides of the greenhouse are complete with just the roof and the door to go on. Mr Stanley is going to level the floor on Friday and we hope to finish the greenhouse early next week.

Mr Haycock attaching bottles to the main structure

Three sides of the greenhouse are now complete

Work continues on the bottle greenhouse

After the horrible weather for School Grounds Day last Friday, the weather this week has been much nicer and Thursday was a particularly nice day. Mr Stanley took a small group of girls from Class AS to help continue building the bottle greenhouse. As you can see from the photos, most of the sides are now complete. We hope to finish the bottle greenhouse in the next couple of weeks.

One side of the bottle greenhouse is now fully complete

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

Science Week at Liss – Class AS makes toothpaste

Warm greetings to our friends in Kafuro. Many students and teachers at Kafuro Primary School will recall that when Mr Stanley first came to Uganda he carried out an experiment with P7 on the effects of different drinks on teeth. The children and teachers (especially Yowasi) were shocked to see the effect that coca cola had on egg shells. Some of the egg shells disintegrated as the sugar in the coca cola rotted the shell away.

In class AS, we made and tested three different toothpastes today. The base ingredients were salt, cornflour, syrup, peppermint essence, baking soda and food colouring with a small amount of water added. The children had to test the toothpaste against four criteria: How well it cleaned permanent marker pen off a plate, who good it smelled, whether it sat on a toothbrush properly and how good it looked.

The children varied the amounts of each ingredient and came up with the following conclusion:

Baking soda is the main cleaning agent. A greater percentage of baking soda in the toothpaste meant that the plate was cleaned in a matter of seconds.

Cornflour helped to thicken the toothpaste so it stayed on the brush.

Only a little peppermint essence was necessary. Too much resulted in the smell being overpowering.

Too much food colouring resulted in the toothpaste looking like green slime.

We would like to ask our friends in P7 if there are any natural ways in which children keep their teeth clean in Uganda if toothpaste isn’t always available?

Cleaning marker pen off a plate with the toothpaste.

Muhudi’s third day at Liss

Friday was another busy day for Muhudi. A full day of teaching at Liss was on the menu and this started with a cultural museum presentation to Classes KR and AS. The next two sessions were cooking rolex with the two aforementioned classes. Mr Stanley and Muhudi are so used to cooking rolex now that they are considering going into partnership and setting up a rolex stall in Katunguru.

Muhudi’s final session of the day at Liss was giving a talk about Islam to Class JA. Mrs Armstrong reported that the talk was brilliant and an hour wasn’t enough to answer all the questions the children had. Muhudi joined Film Club after school to watch The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and then went to visit Liss Scouts in the evening. Muhusi runs the scouts at Kafuro and he drilled the Liss scouts. There are some similarities in how the scouts operate in both countries, but a lot of differences also.

Tomorrow Muhudi will be visiting the sites in London.

Making sure the omelette is properly cooked

Cooking pizzas in the cob oven

Today was the day that Class AS got to use the cob oven for the first time. Mr Stanley and Mrs Moore made a pizza dough and tomato sauce beforehand while the children brought in the pizza toppings of their choice.

The children had to roll out their dough and then spoon on tomato sauce before adding mozzarella cheese and their pizza toppings. Mr Stanley used the pizza peel to put the pizzas in to the cob oven. It took about five minutes for them to cook. Afterwards the whole class went up on to the field to enjoy the delicious food together.

For the benefit of the children in Kafuro, the cob oven works fairly similarly in principle to a clean cook stove. The oven is made of clay, straw and water mixed together and built on a firebrick or concrete base. Wood is burned in the oven, but because it is contained within the oven, the heat lingers and you are able to cook for a longer period of time. Therefore the oven is fuel efficient. Mrs Green and Mr Stanley are going to try and cook pizzas with Kafuro children on a clean cook stove when they visit Kafuro in two weeks time.

Stories with a moral: International Schools

As part of our activities towards the International Schools Award, Children from Liss Junior have been immersing themselves in oral storytelling and creating their own stories with a moral. some are based on existing fables, others are completely original. We are sharing the first selection below and would like our friends at Kafuro Primary School to watch as many of the stories as they can and provide our children with some comments (parents are very welcome to comment too wherever you are in the world!)

We hope that we can record children at Kafuro tell some of the stories they have created when teachers from Liss next come to visit Uganda.

Enjoy the stories!

Yasmin