Global Gateway
Global Gateway is a project funded by The British Council which partners schools in the U.K with different schools in Ghana. The aim of the project is to share teaching and learning strategies.
Each year teachers from Stewart Fleming visit Dunyan Nkwanta school in Mankranso which is located in the Ashanti region of Ghana, West Africa. They spend a week immersing themselves in the Ghanian culture as well as both teaching and observing lessons at the school.
Teachers from Dunyan Nkwanta also have the opportunity to come to Stewart Fleming to share their ideas and observe good practice to feedback to their own school.
It is a great opporunity to provide our children with an insight into a completely different culture and way of life.
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Ghana Visit February 2015
During half term we (Kate Feltham and Louise Smith) visited Dunyan Nkwanta Primary School.
The project set by The British Council this year was 'Chocolate' which meant that the lessons taught were based around how chocolate is made and produced from bean to bar.
Whilst in Ghana we were lucky enough to spend the day with the Chief of the Village who took us into the forest to look at the cocoa beans, how they grow, how they are removed from the trees and then cut out of the pods. We also witnessed the pods being dried out before they were weighed and bagged for export.
Lessons
The school follows the English National Curriculum so we saw a variety of lessons including Maths, Literacy, ICT and Science. Children and teachers are very resourceful and creative in their teaching stategies given their limited resources. For Maths children use stones from the playground as counters and lots of songs and dancing is used to remember different information.
We were also given the opportunity to teach some lessons based around Chocolate. In Year 4 we taught a lesson about the process of chocolate being made from when the beans are collected to them being molded into the final bar. The children had to cut out images of the different stages and then place them in the correct order to show the process.
In Year 3 we taught a lesson about portraiture based on a lesson that was also taught at Stewart Fleming. The children had to draw a portrait of another member of the class. We also shared some of the art work from out school.
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Local Culture
During our stay we were invited to several ceremonies for the promotion of new chiefs; this involved dancing and celebrating. For lunch and dinner we were provided with different meals from the local cuisine this included: rice, noodles, vegetables, fried fish, meat and a selection of different fruits, all of which are freshly picked.
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