Levi Tafari

This week is Arts week in school, when we are off timetable and able to devote time to the more creative and fulfilling parts of the curriculum, the parts that often get squeezed out under the pressures of daily literacy and numeracy lessons. Not that I am decrying these. The '3 R's' are essential but weeks like this provide a timely reminder that those children who are not academically gifted often have talents in other areas, in which, because of the constraints of the curriculum, they are not usually able to show their ability.
So Arts week is welcomed by all. It's a chance to relax, do something different, limited only by the bounds of the imagination - oh, and lack of resources! But that's another story! (See previous post on wasting resources.)
This year's theme is Africa. In my class, we are making a jungle freize, inspired by the paintings of Henri Rousseau so there is green paint, tissue paper and crepe paper everwhere.
This morning we had a visit from the poet, Levi Tafari - yes I know, the link is tenuous as he originates from Jamaica but you can't have everything. This is Levi's second visit to our school and the children really enjoyed his visit and his suggestions for creating poetry. He has that rare gift of being able to engage the young children as well as older ones but hadn't reckoned on the complete lack of understanding of play on words of the average 5 to 7 year old! He talked about personificaion and mentioned that, for instance, a mountain has a foot and a face and some have ears - mountaineers. They're all still puzzling about that one!
On the home front, history has been made! Keith has once again, completely unprompted, mowed the lawn! Twice in 2 weeks!!!! I was therefore moved to take a photo - 2 in fact but one had to be deleted due to an unfortunate gesture being made by him as the shutter clicked!