Weekly Activities

We travelled to Uganda to meet Beatrice Biira. Beatrice was a young girl who was not able to attend school due to a lack of funds.  The Heifer International donated 12 goats to her village and Beatrice's family was one of the recipients.  This goat inevitably changed Beatrice’s life.  After listening to the book, “Beatrice’s Goat” by Page McBrier, the children made a chart comparing their responsibilities with those of Beatrice’s before she was given the goat.  Their list of responsibilities:  to play, to go to school, clean up toys and help mom and dad.  Beatrice’s list was much different.  Her responsibilities included looking after her brothers and sisters, working in the field, feeding the chickens and grinding the cassava plant into flour. Beatrice did not go to school. Oliver summed it up by stating, “We sure are lucky!” After receiving the goat Beatrice was able to make money by selling the goat’s milk.  Not only was...

Today we pretended to purchase a large piece of land to build our own community.  What does our community need? Grace - water Oliver - house, stores Sophie - cars, fire station Jayla - roads, police With these ideas the children planned out their community. As they were building, the children realized that they needed a lot more in their community.  They soon added a school, gas station, hospital, park, playing and other stores such as a tire store and bicycle store. Grace thought the community needed a border in case people wanted to travel. Once completed, the children named their community Postray and began to play. They all chose different jobs in the community: Jayla worked at the firehall and hospital because she wanted to help people. Sophie worked at the bicycle shop. Her responsibility was to deliver bikes to other people's houses. Grace worked at the border. She was responsible for taking people's passports and giving them back then the people could pass....

We played our "People in Our Neighbourhood Game."  The rules of the game were simple:  - take turns  -  roll the die and move your playing piece  - choose a question card  - choose a movement card (to move playing piece forwards or backwards). Examples of the question cards: - what does this person do in the community? - what would happen if we didn't have this role in the community? Playing the game helped me see how much the children understand about community members' roles and responsibilities. What impressed me the most was how the Fire Group worked together as a community by taking turns, helping each other count and answer questions. We have shared our game with the other children to play.