Discovering Malawi

With Miss Thomas year 4 and 5

We began by looking at how colourful most of the buildings in Africa were, and compared them with colourful buildings which had been constructed in Europe. These looked like they were inspired from other building styles from around the world.

Every pupil recreated this template on a A2 sheet of card, this required careful accurate measuring and mental arithmetic. Maths applied to a real world setting

Every pupil in the class made a scale model of the Mgosa school in Malawi and decorated it with patterns, teaching equipment and images from traditional stories

We tried to predict the construction costs for the replica school building, by listing and pricing all the required elements. The cost was well within our budget.

The application of maths to provide information, again in a real world situation.

The application of maths to construction tasks was used constantly as every cut line was calculated and measured. This also required the use of hand held power tools to cut materials to size and fix them together. Priming of all the boards was also done by pupils

We made this building in wet, occasionally snowy and always cold conditions We have a blackboard inside the building as it is a school............. Remember!

We drew around ourselves with a pencil and then painted our own portraits

Everyone did their school badge and Rob might have helped with our faces

We had a basic pattern idea but had to adapt and modify it as windows and corners interrupted us

These are puppets, we could screw them to sticks and perform the stories we have written. We also have made batik curtains using material dyes

We displayed the books written in class, the drums, and the batik curtains, and the blackboard. The cut out animals were the characters in some of the books. One parent said my son comes home from school every day and goes straight into the shed to saw and nail pieces of wood together together.