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In the February half term of 2006 we had the pleasure of visiting and working at the Ladybird Primary School in Matugga near Kampala. The visit was an interesting experience for all three of us; Christine Best, head of English, Kim Barlow, teaching assistant and Chris Lackey part time technology teacher. Our brief was to complete a number of projects which involved both the children at Ingleton Middle School in North Yorkshire and the children at Ladybird Primary. During our visit we stayed at a small hotel between Matugga and the capital Kampala. This allowed us to relax after the school day and to meet up socially with teachers from Ladybird in the evening.
On the first day we visited the school and talked to each class in turn. We met with Director of Studies David Mayende and Deputy Head Edwin Kabuka to organise our timetable. It was agreed that we would teach each class in the school from P1 to P7. The lessons would include technology, English and work related to reading and the joint project on life in the community.
In the technology lessons we looked at toys such as model cars and marbles. We made snapping crocodiles using paper fasteners, card, lollypop sticks and masking tape. The basic classroom surface at ladybird is the sloping desk and this makes work with scissors, card and masking tape difficult. The pupils were very patient and co-operative and the results were quite good given that the pupils had mostly not used scissors before.
An introductory lesson with P7 focussed on the careers that the pupils expected to follow when they left school and how this compared with the work that their parents and grandparents did.
Seamus Heaney’s poem "Digging" was used to open up a discussion about whether the pupils intended to work on the land, as perhaps their parents or grandparents had done or whether they would work with a pen as teachers, doctors, lawyers etc. It turned out that the vast majority of pupils wanted to work in professions or white collar jobs. In fact many of the parents had relatively middle class occupations such as doctors, civil service, printers and teachers. This was perhaps not surprising in a fee paying primary school which placed considerable emphasis on good exam results. The work shown below was typical of pupil responses.
