This week my grade 2 class video conferenced with kids living in Kenya, Africa to learn more about different communities around the world. My students have each picked a country they would like to learn more about and I have arranged video conferences with schools in each of these countries to teach us about their people, communities, cultures, and celebrations. In total we will video conference with students living in 16 different countries between now and the end of the school year. The students get to ask each other questions and share information about what it is like to live in our countries. My students and I made some notes about what we learned during our video conference with the kids at Cheery School in Nairobi, Kenya:
1. The kids are 8-10 years old and they go to Cheery School in Nairobi, Kenya. They learn English, Math, Science, Social Studies, Music, Physical Education, Religion, and Swahili. Swahili is their native language.
2. The weather in Nairobi is hot. It is between 17°C and 28°C. During our video conference it was rainy and sunny. We told them the weather here in Ontario can be hot too. Some days it is 30°C, but it can also be really cold. Some days it’s -30°C. We showed the kids all of the winter clothes we need to put on to go outside. They were very surprised.
3. Some of the animals that live in Nairobi are lions, tigers, cheetahs, giraffes, zebras, elephants, and rhinos. We don’t have any of these animals living here in Ontario.
4. Some of the foods they eat in Nairobi are spaghetti, chicken, pizza, sausage, peas, vegetables, fruit, rice, and water. The kids were very interested in the food we showed them in our lunches. They said they had never seen packaged food before. They wanted to know all about our juice boxes.
5. The sports the kids play in school are skipping, soccer (which they call football), rugby, taekwondo, tag, basketball, and baseball. We play similar sports here in Ontario.
6. We learned to say some words in Swahili:
- mama is “mom”
- baba is “dad”
- kucheza is “play”
- simba is “lion” When the kids told us how to say lion we recognized the word from the movie the Lion King. The Lion King’s name is Simba. Now we know Simba means lion.
These are some of the video clips we filmed during our video conference:
To follow our video conferences with kids living around the world please visit our Busy Bees Class Blog!
Leigh Cassell
Elementary Teacher, AMDSB
Founder of the Digital Human Library
This post is also available in: Français (French)
