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.
Tag: Rowan Class
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.
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.
Continuing our look at Fairtrade chocolate
To begin today’s lesson, Mr Stanley drew two chocolate bars on the whiteboard and asked the class to deliberate on what factors would lead to them buying one bar or the other. The children came up with the following considerations:
- Taste/texture
- Price
- Size
- Special offers/promotions
- Fairtrade mark
- Advertising
- Brand
- Type (dark, milk or white)
- Quality
- Condition
We then looked at what the Fairtrade mark actually means and identified the four key components of this:
- It means farmers and workers get better wages and working conditions
- It guarantees a fair price for the producers
- It provides extra money to go to the community
- Allows small farmers to join together in cooperatives to sell their products.
We discussed how community money might be used to improve sanitation, provide teachers for a school,improve medical care or to build housing. Next, we looked closely at the different stages of the journey from producer to consumer and arranged them in the correct order.
- After he has scraped the cocoa beans out of the cocoa pod, the farmer leaves them to dry.
- The dried cocoa beans are weighed.
- The sacks of cocoa beans are loaded onto a ship, ready to be brought from Africa to Europe
- The cocoa beans are ground. Milk and sugar are added to make chocolate – yummy!
- Chocolate bars are formed, wrapped and packed. Then they are delivered to the shops.
Mr Stanley then outlined one final task before we evaluate the learning unit. The children have been set the task of writing to Tesco persuading them to stock a new Ugandan Fairtrade product – Crested Crane Chocolate. They have also been asked to design the chocolate bar and a new Fairtrade Mark. The results of this will be seen in the next blog post.
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 and chocolate
For our third session on fair trade at Liss Junior School, we focused on chocolate. Two thirds of cocoa produced worldwide is estimated to be grown by smallholders. West African economies are critically dependent on cocoa. For example, revenue from cocoa accounts for more than one third of Ghana’s total export earnings, and 40% of those of Cote d’Ivoire, the
world’s largest cocoa producer. The instability of the world cocoa market, with its huge fluctuations in prices, means cocoa farmers are in a precarious situation – most struggle to make a living.
In Britain we eat more chocolate per capita than any other country, each consuming around 9.5kg per year (and these figures are from before the Covid pandemic when chocolate consumption rocketed).
As a class we approached the topic by taking part in a survey all about chocolate. The class were first asked if they liked chocolate. 26 out of 27 (96%) said YES. Next, they were asked what their favourite chocolate was. As you can imagine, there was a wide range of answers from the classic galaxy bars all the way up to posher Lindt (just for information, Mr Stanley favourite is the Kit Kat chunky – which was fairtrade as of last year). they were then asked to explain what attracted them to certain types of chocolate bars. The children were very honest and many of them said that advertising played a major part – it just goes to show how much of an influence advertising has on children.
The children were then asked a question. For every 100 chocolate bars in the UK, how many are eaten by men, women and children. This promoted a fascinating discussion. Most of the children thought that children ate the majority, men the second biggest amount and women the least. There was one exception in the class (who shall remain nameless) who thought that his mum ate more chocolate than the rest of his family put together.
The children were surprised by the results. Out of every 100 chocolate bars:
Men ate 26
Children ate 34
Women ate 40
So our nameless pupil was the closest to being correct. We then looked at how much money went to various people in the production chain of chocolate. So for every £1 bar of chocolate:
7p goes to the cocoa farmer
40p goes to the chocolate company
28p goes to the retailer
15p is taxed.
Once the children heard these figures they were outraged and questioned the fairness of this, There then followed a discussion about how many times we have all bought chocolate that is not fair trade rather than fairtrade chocolate because the non fair trade chocolate is cheaper.
Next week, we are going to look more closely at how fairtrade helps chocolate growers and what we can do to support them
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:
| Statement | Votes cast | Percentage |
| Climate change means flood and droughts | 19 | 26% |
| International trading system is unfair to poor countries | 5 | 7% |
| People can’t grow enough food because of wars | 13 | 18% |
| People are too poor to buy food | 15 | 21% |
| Food grown on the best farmland is sold to rich countries | 3 | 4% |
| Many big companies don’t pay the tax they should to poor countries | 2 | 3% |
| People in rich countries want to pay less for things they buy, so wages in poor countries stay low | 2 | 3% |
| Corruption and bad government in bad countries | 1 | 1% |
| People in rich countries don’t give enough in aid and charity | 13 | 18% |
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
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.
Which is the real Uganda?
Year 6 have been looking at pictorial evidence to gain a sense of what Uganda is like. Mr Stanley divided each class into two teams and gave each team twenty photos. The team had to write down everything they could see in the photo, give it a title and then write a paragraph stating what they had learned from that photo.
Once the team had finished, they had to write a brief summary explaining what sort of country they thought Uganda was. As you can see below, the answers varied dramatically between each team as Mr Stanley had given 20 rural photos to one team and 20 urban photos to the other.
The answer to the question is that Uganda is both an urban and a rural country with extremely diverse habitats.
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