Africa

We have woven our own strips of Kente Cloth which is made in Ghana on a loom.

Our theme this half term has been ‘African Animals and Stories’. We have been learning about many different kinds of animals, such as elephants, zebras, tortoises and chameleons, finding out where they come from and their habitats. We have been learning about the grasslands or savannahs of Africa where giraffes and antelopes live, as well as the Rainforest where you would find the African Parrot. We have also been learning that Africa is a huge continent made up of lots of different countries. We have learnt about the five main regions – North, South, East, West and Central Africa and our favourite game is using special clues to find a country on the map. We are getting very good at it!
We have also been learning about different artistic traditions that can be found in Africa, such as textiles and masks. We have woven our own strips of Kente Cloth, which is a very colourful textile made in Ghana on a very narrow loom. It was quite tricky to start with but we soon learnt how to do it.

 

On our visit to the Horniman Museum, which has a big African art collection, we saw a display of Adire Cloth. This type of textile comes from Nigeria, and is made using dye made from the leaves of the Indigo plant. We have made our own version, tying up the cloth very tightly with string, and using cold water dye the same colour as Indigo. Everyone’s patterns were very different depending on how they had tied the string! It was great fun and we could hardly wait for it to dry so we could see how they had all turned out!
We made our on version of Adire cloth, which originates in Nigeria and is made with cassava flour and dye made from the leaves of the Indigo plant.