Just to introduce this one – this is something that happened back in June of this year – I wrote all of these posts (there are actually 4 parts to it) but never got to publish them on my blog even though I promised to! After someone asked me recently on twitter whatever happened to the Nigerian stuff well here it is…
As part of the International Inspiration partnership which is an international project that will reach 12 million children from 20 different countries by 2012 we are partnered for the next few years with the Government Secondary School in Karu, Abuja in Nigeria. We made our visit to the school in March 2010 and recently it was the first time our Nigerian partners had come to our school in Cornwall.
It was such a fantastic sight although a little strange to see our Nigerian guests arrive at school. I say strange as I just never thought they would ever get here but is was lovely to see them arrive and all the memories from the Nigerian experience in March came flooding back to me. Our guests were Ngozi the Headteacher and Regina the PE and link teacher from our partner school called the Government Secondary School in Karu. It was the first time that Ngozi or Regina had been outside of Nigeria and definitely their first time to the UK and Cornwall.
When we visited Nigeria we were given such an amazing reception and they really did celebrate this to the highest degree and that is why it was so important that we could show the same warm welcome as we had received in march. We started out with a welcome breakfast with members of the school leadership team and it was a very traditional cornish/French/irish breakfast which was an unusual treat for our guests. We then had just about time to take part in our first of many photo shoots that week.
Some of our students then toured our visitors around the school site, this took around an hour and they soon realised how much bigger in size our school was compared to theirs back in Nigeria, in fact as I finished teaching Ngozi the Head dragged me off to my office where she proceeded to sleep in my chair for the next hour or two whilst Regina had some of our students demonstrate the game of netball and cricket as these are two of the sports that we are introducing to our partner school in Nigeria.
It was then time to really celebrate and we moved to the main hall where we witnessed a very special celebratory welcome assembly complete with our chair of governors and the local town mayor who also happens to be a teacher at our school (Mayor Killeya). We then witnessed an hour of top class entertainment from our students. This was fantastic to see and never mind Britain’s got talent but Saltash.net certainly has talent! Our students performed music solos, classical piano piece, poetry readings, dance performances and last but not least a special performance piece from this year’s school musical Grease.
Another great celebration event of the week was our World Cup Party on the Wednesday after school where 150 students attended to watch the game on the big screen. Students raised money through a raffle and face painting etc to help fund sports equipment for the Nigerian schools. It was a fantastic event and our Nigerian guests found it extremely noisy particularly the Vuvuzuela’s, even the England team managed to win so celebrations all around!
Listen to the atmosphere here:
Did you have any world cup parties? What did you get up to? In Part two I will discuss Leadership & Learning.