Category: Rowan Class

Yr 6 make rolex

As part of the Yr 6 DT project on Ugandan food, Liss Yr 6 pupils were tasked with making rolex (rolled eggs), a Ugandan street food in which a filled omelette is rolled in a chapatti. The pupils’ brief was as follows:

To celebrate the link between Liss and Kafuro, you have been tasked with creating a rolex using fusion ingredients i.e. the best ingredients from both the UK and Uganda.

You must create a rolex (and side salad) which looks good, tastes great and covers the major food groups.

Before the pupils made their rolex, they had to do some research on popular Ugandan food to get an idea of the staples of everyday life. Next, they tasted and rated a selection of ingredients such as muchomo (grilled meat), chapattis, roast and sweet potato, salad, Katchembali (a special salad with tomato, peppers and chilli) and plantain chips.

After the food tasting, the Liss pupils formed groups to design their rolexes and accompanying salads or side dishes. They took on board the idea of fusion food with some groups opting for ingredients such as bacon and sausage while other groups were more exotic with ingredients such as mango.

The next task was to actually make their dishes. Two groups at a time worked with Mr Stanley who showed them how to make a chapatti and how to cut and grate ingredients properly. Each group then completed their tasty dishes as seen below.

Finally, after eating their rolexes, each group had to complete an evaluation form. It is safe to say that, after reading the evaluations, the Liss pupils thoroughly enjoyed the experience and many intend to make rolexes at home. It’s also worth mentioning that when Mr Mukama saw photos of the rolexes, his comment was that they had made him salivate. High praise indeed!

Making rolexes with Year 6

As part of our unit on Ugandan food, Year 6 at Liss have been designing, making and tasting their own Ugandan rolexes. After extensive research on common Ugandan food, the pupils got into small groups to design their rolexes (rolled eggs) and chooose the ingredients to either go in the omelette or to go on the side of the plate. Many of the pupils opted to choose a fusion of British and Ugandan flavours – this resulted in some very tasty looking rolexes as the photos below show.

The children created some very tasty rolexes

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.

Generating ideas for each group’s child

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.

Food Webs

One of the topics we are covering as part of the British Council’s Connecting Classrooms program is food webs which was suggested by Mr Thembo, the headteacher of Kafuro Primary School.

Steve Peach very kindly produced a PowerPoint which took the children through the differences between food chains and food webs. Mr Stanley was very impressed with the children’s knowledge of food chains and the terms producer, consumer and predator. Only one pupil in the class had a good idea about what a food web is, so Mr Stanley was able to use the PowerPoint (displayed below) to show some examples of food webs in both UK and Uganda.

Once the children had got used to the idea of what a food web meant, we created our own using animals commonly found in the UK

We then went onto the playground with a big ball of string in order to try and replicate this food web. The photos below make it look as if we were actually quite successful. However, the complexity of the food web meant that we actually ran out of string before we could complete it.

Our final discussion of the session was based around what might happen to the food web if one of the elements was removed from it. We discussed several possibilities, but the children concluded that if the frog was removed from our food web then much of the web could collapse. Clearly removing land plants or water plants would have a massive effect on the ecosystem. When you think about the damage this would cause and then compare it to vast deforestation taking place on our planet, it makes you wonder whether humans are actually very clever at all!

We are looking forward to seeing what food webs other schools in the twinning project produce.

Fairtrade: Session 2

Following on from last week’s fair trade lesson, Rowan class started off with a quick recap of the previous week’s learning, in particular a renewed discussion over how much people should be paid for the process of growing and selling bananas. The children decided to write their thoughts. Here are three of the children’s arguments:

After the children had completed their writing, we repeated the previous exercise when the children had to sell their bananas to Mr Stanley in his role as representative of the Big Banana Company. However, this time some of the children were given fair trade tokens. When Mr Stanley came to buy their bananas he gave each of these pupils 8 tokens instead of the two which he gave to the rest of the class.

This then led to a discussion on what Fairtrade means to the growers and the children completed an exercise on the difference between a banana and a fair trade banana.

The children came to the following results:

For a fairtrade banana

  • My workers have better homes and better education
  • My farmer has a guaranteed contract
  • My workers spent many hours looking after me
  • My workers are members of a co-op. They can make their own decisions.
  • My farmer doesn’t use dangerous chemicals on the banana plants.

For a non fairtrade banana

  • My workers have poor housing, poor education and poor health
  • My workers have no union and no say in how their lives go
  • My workers had to work 12 hours a day, six days a week
  • My workers could lose their jobs anytime
  • My workers used dangerous chemicals to kill any pest which might damage the banana plants.

We finished the session by discussing what fairtrade means and came to the conclusion that fair trade allows the farmers and growers to obtain a fair price for the work they carry out in producing many of our staple foods. It also stops big companies driving down prices at the expense of the growers just so we can have cheap food

Beginning our journey to investigate Fairtrade

This morning, the Year 6 classes as Liss Junior School began to take a detailed look at fair trade. We began by discussing what causes poverty. The children were given 3 beans each and were asked to investigate nine statements. When they found a statement that they felt was most accurate they could place one of their beans in a cup next to the statement. If they wished, they could place all their beans in a particular cup. These are the results for Rowan Class:

StatementVotes
cast		Percentage
Climate change means flood and droughts1926%
International trading system is unfair to poor
countries		57%
People can’t grow enough food because of wars1318%
People are too poor to buy food1521%
Food grown on the best farmland is sold to rich
countries		34%
Many big companies don’t pay the tax they should
to poor countries		23%
People in rich countries want to pay less for
things they buy, so wages in poor countries stay
low		23%
Corruption and bad government in bad countries11%
People in rich countries don’t give enough in aid
and charity		1318%
  • Casting votes for the causes of poverty
  • There was a lot of thought and discussion

Once we had calculated the percentages, we had a discussion as to why the pupils had made their choices. What became very clear was how aware the children are of the issues relating to climate change and war – the situation in Syria was mentioned several times. Where the children had less awareness was on the issues of corruption and bad government. This is not necessarily surprising as they are not at an age where they would study politics yet.

With this opening task complete, our next task was to find out where much of our food comes from in the UK. We used a world map and identified which countries supplied the UK the following foods:

Bananas – The Caribbean, Costa Rica

Soya – Brazil

Pineapple – Costa Rica

Cocoa – West Africa

Sugar – The Caribbean

Palm Oil – South East Asia

We noticed that many of these ingredients came from poorer parts of the world. This raised the question – if all these poor countries are selling us lots of good then why are they so poor?

We then looked at the ingredients in a chocolate bar and found out that only one of the ingredients is produced in the UK. A discussion followed about why chocolate was so cheap in the UK when so many of the ingredients were imported. Mr Stanley told the children how big companies will pay producers very low prices in order to ensure that prices are kept low in richer countries like the UK and to ensure that their profit margins high.

Next, Mr Stanley got the children to undertake an exercise. He asked the class to draw their own bananas to represent bananas that were grown.

  • Drawing bananas

Once the children had finished drawing and cutting out their bananas, Mr Stanley said that he would return to the class in five minutes to make the class an offer for the 25 bananas that had been produced.

When Mr Stanley returned to the class, the children had discussed the sale carefully and come up with a price of 1000 counters for all 25 bananas. Mr Stanley said that he would consider the price and would have a think about it. After 30 seconds Mr Stanley made the class a counter – offer of 50 units: one – twentieth of the price the children had asked for. This caused understandable outrage in the class, but Mr Stanley told the class that BB (Big Bananas), the company he was representing had been to another class who had accepted this offer. If Rowan Class weren’t prepared to accept his offer then he would do business with the other class.

With the exercise over and the children very angry, Mr Stanley took the children through the stages from a banana being grown to being sold in a supermarket in the UK. This can be seen below:

We discussed who should get the most money from the sale of the banana. The children thought that the grower should receive the majority of the payment or at least an equal share. They were genuinely shocked when they saw how little the grower was actually paid. One pupil was so angry about this that she was almost speechless.

In our next lesson we will be writing about what we have discovered so far as well as beginning to investigate what fairtrade actually means.

Cooking Ugandan meals at Liss

Warm greetings to our Ugandan friends at Kafuro. We hope that you had a good Easter.

After tasting Ugandan – style meals before the Easter holidays, Liss pupils in Year 6 came back to school ready to create their own meals. Ugandan chapattis had proven to be very popular with our pupils and these formed the basis of many of the children’s meals. Also extremely popular was muchomo – our pupils like meat!

All of our pupils had heard from Mr Stanley about the wonders of Ugandan rolex and more than a few of the groups were determined to create their own. The pupils used green and red peppers, tomatoes, carrots, cabbage and even bacon and sausage in their rolexes. One group even added chili.

As the photos below show, the pupils had a great time creating their meals and really enjoyed making chapattis, cutting up salads, grilling meat and presenting their meals.

Our pupils are wondering what UK meals Ugandan pupils would like to cook if they had the chance

Ugandan food tasting at Liss

As part of our DT topic, Liss Yr 6 pupils took part in tasting Ugandan foods before researching and making their own Ugandan – style meal after Easter. Among the foods the children tasted were muchomo, chapatti, katchembali, roast Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, plantain chips and a simple salad. Most of the children really enjoyed the tasting with muchomo proving to be very popular. They had to give each food a mark out of 10 and explain why they had given their score. We will post some of our images of the meals the children make when they return to school

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 20th. 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.