A Ugandan Visitor

Year 3 and Year 2 had a proper Ugandan experience yesterday when they were visited by Ronnie Musabe, the Twinning Project’s ‘man on the ground’ in Uganda.

Ronnie spent the morning with Year 3 reviewing their topic on changing Communities. He was able to answer the children’s questions on the relationship between the villages surrounding Queen Elizabeth National Park and the park rangers, particularly with regards to villagers encroaching on park land to plant crops.

In the afternoon, Ronnie visited Year 2 who have just begun their topic on Uganda. Again, he had many questions to answer and said afterwards that he could’ve been at the school for a week and not managed to answer them all. One of the activities Ronnie carried out with both year groups was to go through the Uganda Boxes that the Twinning Project have collated over the years. The children were able to see some traditional Ugandan toys, instruments and clothing as well as well as more modern materials.

This was a highly successful day from which the children obviously benefitted enormously. Ronnie was incredibly impressed, not only with the children’s maturity, but also with the quality of initial and follow – up questions that the children came up with. He told Mr Stanley that many of the tourists who come to Uganda come nowhere near to matching the children in terms of curiosity.

Everyoneat the Liss Federation would like to thank Ronnie for spending the day with us. When Ronnie returns to Uganda during half term, he will be taking some money with him in order to enable Kafuro to reopen lines of communication with Liss and also some special varieties of tomato seeds for the children to grow at Kafuro Primary School. For those readers of the blog who don’t know, Kafuro is famous throughout Uganda for the quality of its tomatoes, so we think the new varieties will grow really well. We hope to show you photos of the tomatoes later this year.

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A summary of our learning at Clanfield Junior School

A warm welcome to our friends in the UK and Uganda who are reading this blog, particularly our friends at our twinned school, Bukorwe Primary School. We are saddened that the pandemic has meant that reciprocal visits between the UK and Uganda have been unable to take place, but even more saddened that the majority of pupils in Uganda have been unable to attend school for much of the last 18 months.

We would like to share with you some of our learning from the Connecting Classrooms projects we have been working on. Our pupils in Year 3 have really enjoyed learning all about Uganda and comparing it to the UK. We used a computer programme called Google Earth to look at the Ugandan countryside and we were able to see wild animals that are very different to the UK such as elephants, buffalo and hippos. In the UK we have foxes, badgers and deer (which are similar to Ugandan Kob). We discussed why the animals were so different and came to the conclusion that animals adapt to their environment. We learned that Uganda tends to be hotter than the UK, but when it rains it is often torrential.

One of the tasks we set the pupils was to write a letter to an airline pilot and try and persuade him or her to visit either the UK or Uganda based on our research. The pupils had to justify their reasons and you can see some of their letters below.

Another activity the teachers set the Year 3 pupils could be described as a critical thinking task. The pupils were given a photo of a private school in Uganda and had to use clues to work out what it was. At first the pupils believed that it must be in the UK because it showed wealth and affluence. When they used some clues prompted by the teacher to work it out, then there followed a long discussion about how Africa is misrepresented.

We were also able to use this critical thinking in other lessons such as guided reading lessons where pupils used clues from book covers and blurbs to decipher meaning and also carried out zones of inference tasks.

We can’t wait to hear about your learning in Uganda and especially at Bukorwe when you return to school

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Schools involved in QEPP

The schools involved in the Queen Elizabeth Parks Project are as follows (Ugandan Schools first):

Bukorwe Primary School twinned with Clanfield Junior School

Katunguru Primary School twinned with Hart Plain Junior School

Kafuro Primary School twinned with Liss Junior School

Kyambura Primary School twinned with Sheet Primary School

Mahyoro Primary School twinned with West Meon Primary School

Nyakatonzi Primary School twinned with Herne Primary School

Over the coming months we hope that you will see plenty of learning from all of the schools as they share their experience of conservation and their own culture.