Field trip to Pitanga rocks with Kongo Junior High School

Students from Kongo Junior Hight School forms 2 and 3 took a field trip to nearby Pitanga rocks on the 25^th of October 2016. Pitanga is a village next to our school which is famous for the big cliffs that it has. ‘Pii’ in nabt language means a rock so this means the village has been named after the cliffs.

We started our trip early in the morning so that the sun would not be too hot on us. On the way there we were singing and dancing. Some of the songs we had created for ourselves and some of them are local traditional songs.

While walking we also talked about the different plants and trees that grow here and discussed the ways we can use them in our daily lives. Some of the plants that we saw were: shea tree, dawadawa tree, burasus palm and the red berry tree.

The tree that has the most uses here is the shea tree. People eat the fresh fruits of it and use the nutty seeds inside the fruit to produce shea butter. Shea butter is widely used for cooking and skin care. In addition to the butter, people also cut the bark of the tree to get a special gum, which can be used for mending things or just as chewing gum. Also the leaves of it have some medicinal qualities so after boiling them in water the liquid can be used for bathing newly born babies. People use the wood that you get from shea tree to make different tools as well.

 

Are school introduced fruits from around the world as part of the world’s week

On Friday, 27^th November 2015 Year 8 students presented different fruits from around the world and the entire school took part of the lecture. It was possible to listen, look and taste the fruits. More than 20 different fruits were introduced: where and how they grow, how the plantations look like, who the major manufacturers are, why these fruits are good for you and how they can be used.

Students and teachers could taste avocado, persimmon, tangerine, pomelo, grapes, pomegranate, grapefruit, melon, kiwi, orange, watermelon, banana, pineapple, lime, physalis, kumquat, and papaya. Dragon fruit, carambola, feijoa, and lychee were also shown. Many looked the exotic fruits suspiciously and dared to taste only the familiar ones. The purchase of fruits was financed by MTÜ Mondo and the members of student representative board came to school early in the morning to clean and prepare the fruits.

 

At the end of the lecture, teams of students from Year 1 to 5 had to complete a quiz on their mobile phones using Socrative, an online learning environment.

Though this kind of event was organised for the first time, it proved to be a success and some thoughts have been already gathered for the next year.

 

Ingela Uussalu, the spokeperson of student representative board

Tartu Hiie School and Rise and Shine School Exchange Drawings

Tartu Hiie School have good friends from Kenya from Rise and Shine School. We study about each others countries, nature, traditions, schoollife. We write and draw about these themes and change packets. Packets reach to us 2-3 times in year, because we can change these with help of volunteers. We are thankful that volunteers share with us their first-hand impressions and memories and show many nice videos and pictures about our friends.

This time we exchanged food pictures, below you can see a gallery of our drawings. Fruits and Easter drawings are from Hiie School, all others are from the students of Rise and Shine School in Kenya.