School uses art to teach kids about J’can culture
The Allman Town Primary School in Kingston has taken on a new and innovative way to teach children about the Jamaican culture while incorporating other subjects such as social studies.
The initiative, which started last school year, saw the school taking on a new visual arts teacher, Anthea McGibbon, who is responsible for bringing out the artistic nature in students while pushing them to think on a higher level.
McGibbon told THE STAR that students often times do not channel their energy in the right direction.
“We wanted to get the children to find a new way to expel their energy, because you know how children in Jamaica are. Some of them are getting aggressive. You know how they always say the devil find work for idle hands? We wanted to eliminate that and find a great way to channel their energy,” she said.
She said that the school decided to have a competition among the students with the aim of enabling students to appreciate their culture while preserving it.
“They are learning different aspects of the visual arts curriculum. This enables the critical-thinking skills of the students. The competition was for last term and it came over into this term,” she said.
TEACHING JAMAICAN CULTURE
The competition, which allows students to build board games from recycled paper, teaches them about the different rivers and mountains in Jamaica, as well as the different folkloric stories that are popular to Jamaican culture.
“While playing the game, they learn the stories. For example, one of the board games is about the ‘Rolling Calf’, which is a popular Jamaican story. When they roll the dice and it lands on a rolling calf, they would freeze or turn backwards, because that is what the story is about — when you see a rolling calf you freeze,” she said.
“They also learn about the rivers in Jamaica when they play the ‘River Muma and the Gold Comb’ game,” she added.
McGibbon said the students are really excited and receptive of this new way of learning because of the amount of knowledge they get from it.
“The students want to play the games all the time. They play it during their lunchtime and even after school. Because of the good feedback that the students are giving about what they have learnt, the principal said she is very happy that we took on this initiative,” she said.