Dear Reader,
Today, we are blogging about our time partnering with London Museum Docklands over the summer! The museum held their first ever Festival of Caribbean Culture, and we were invited to share our ACE Learning Arts and Culture lessons for children over the two-day Fest. Over 3,000 families came to the event, and we got super awesome feedback about our workshop delivery from the participants!
What’s ACE Learning Arts and Culture? It’s a curriculum we developed at Araba to introduce children in St. Thomas, JAMAICA to countries and cultures around the world. It is part of our mission to help our children build a positive view of themselves and have tolerance and acceptance for others. It’s a universal concept that should be taught to all children, but with our children in St. Thomas there were specific areas we wanted to address within this curriculum.
These are:
- Celebrating the children’s Jamaican heritage and culture with pride.
- Highlighting the positive contributions of people with brown and black skin in the world.
- Wanting our children to understand that there are countries around the world they can visit one day if they wish.
- Getting rid of problematic expectations about ‘farrin’ and people from ‘farrin’.
- Being able to empathise with people from other countries and have compassion for issues taking place at home and in faraway places.
- Developing problem solving and critical thinking skills, so children grow up and can offer solutions to modern day problems at home and across the world.
You can find an example of one of our ACE Learning Arts and Culture Lesson Plans in our Shop.
If you’ve had time to have a look, you’ll see that our lessons are split into 2 parts:
- Listen and Learn (country/culture facts and current affairs)
- Creative Activity (related to the country/culture)
For the Festival of Caribbean Culture, we wanted to focus more on the creative activities whilst still sharing our knowledge about the countries with the families.
To plan for the Festival, London Museum Docklands invited us to a Partner Day where we got to meet all the other Partners, including Docklands Village Nursery (a phenomenal Caribbean family run nursery in London), Playworker Amber and Nzinga Dance Company to name a few.
At Araba, we like our work to be child-led wherever possible, so of course we had our 3 ACE teachers (Miah, Seriah and Alexa) onboard. Since the beginning of Araba, the ACE teachers have made literacy and numeracy videos for children in St. Thomas, donated toys and hygiene items to the children, modelled Araba t-shirts, sold Workbooks at the Black British Book Festival and so much more! For the Festival, the children had a say in what we taught, how we taught it, and the way they would participate on the day(s). They decided that we would study 3 Caribbean countries: Jamaica, Saint Lucia and Trinidad and Tobago, and help the young visitors with the activities.
To learn about Jamaica, the children created a hand-held Doctor Bird. This was the first activity on both days, and we had the most tranquil noises of Jamaica’s national bird in the background (courtesy of Ras Kitchen who is actually very familiar with St Thomas). The hummingbird’s iridescent colouring is so beautifully unique, and it was fun trying to replicate it with sequins and glitter glue (the children LOVED the glitter glue).
To learn about Saint Lucia, the children watched a live volcano explosion (or bubbles as one child put it) and created a volcano lamp with tea lights. ACE Teacher Miah had prepared some information about the Pitons, which she confidently shared with each set of visitors. ACE Teacher Seriah researched general facts about Saint Lucia and created an informative poster. She also helped make the papier-mâché display volcanoes the night before (actual crisis moments :D). Our volcano lamp activity was a hit, and some children and parents/carers said it was the best part of their day!
To learn about Trinidad and Tobago, the children studied bioluminescence (living light) and the impacts of stress on living organisms. We explored how nature has many magical ways of responding to stress, just like the phytoplankton in the Ortoire River. The families had to imagine and draw how they’d like their body to respond to stress if given the choice. We also brought in some ‘real’ phytoplankton in our hand painted dark-box. It had a peephole, and we shook it so the children could see the glowing organisms inside. This activity was the most relaxing way to end each day.
How cool are these pictures? We hope you can see what a wonderful Festival of Caribbean Culture we had in August 2024! See what your children can learn and create by accessing the exact lesson plans for your classroom, club or home here. Would you like us to take the ACE Learning Arts and Culture Curriculum to your school or club? Drop us an email at: [email protected] We look forward to doing more workshops in the future!
Thank you to London Museum Docklands, our ACE teachers, Miah and Seriah, Serena, Shenaid, Camile, Ariana, Little Alicia, Alexa, Ava, Charlotte, Rosemary, Elli and Filsan. It was fantastic working with you all, and you helped make our two days enjoyable and successful!
Thanks for reading!
100% of the proceeds from this partnership went towards purchasing school supplies for children at our safe haven, and in St. Thomas.
