Amoafi Kwapong has over 25 years experience of storytelling with riddles, call and response songs and singing/musical games with the children, teachers, librarians and other adults who work with children in schools, libraries and other centres in the UK and abroad, supporting bilingual and multilingual learning. She specialises in traditional African Cultures and Voice.

Target participants: The Foundation Stage and Key Stages 1 and 2. (INSET, Workshops, Book Week, Black History Month)

Whole day: Three sessions - two workshops of up to one hour each (a.m. – one before and one after play e.g. 9:30-10:30 & 10:45-11:45) and a presentation of sharing with the rest of the Key Stage (p.m. – straight after lunch e.g. 13:00-14:00 or 13:30-14:30).

Testimonial

(taken from an article written by Stephanie Sparrow for The Guardian):

A school visit from a storyteller has led to a sustainability project across two continents at Alderbrook primary in Balham, south London.

The storyteller, Amoafi Kwapong, suggested to Alderbrook's ethnic minority achievement teacher Lesley Alexander that the school might want to link with a school in Kwapong's home town in Akropong-Akuapem, in Ghana.

Alexander furthered the idea by researching and winning funding from the Department for International Development's (DfID's) Global School Partnerships initiative administered by the British Council.

Starting with reciprocal research visits between the schools in late 2003, the project is now funded by an annual grant of £4,800 for two years from the DfID, shared equally between the two schools to cover curriculum development and teaching visits.

Alexander was keen to find shared interests across the two continents and was delighted to see the beginnings of a small garden at the West African school.

"As we had a small but overgrown plot in Balham, I thought this would be something we could work on together and could give us a common interest," she says.

Alexander enlisted the local church group to help get the Balham garden into shape while the caretaker built a raised bed for vegetables.

From the shared interests in their crops - Alderbrook children grow carrots and beans while the Ghanaian students nurture plantain and cassava - the pupils grew used to writing to each other.

"It can sometimes be difficult to motivate children to think about foreign countries, but the link with Ghana has made it easier to grasp," says Alexander.

The Ghanaian school has helped with many other Balham projects. Last year when Alderbrook's year 6 were looking at cocoa farming and fair trade, their counterparts visited the neighbouring Tetteh Quarshie cocoa farm and sent photographs and reports to the UK.

Ghana is also having a resonance in art and literacy. Year 5 children, for example, have created and exchanged diaries of a typical week with children at Akropong-Akuapem. "The UK children were shocked at their friends' responsibilities, from fetching their own water to cooking their own meals," says Alexander.

All the school has benefited from a recent visit to Akropong-Akuapem by Alderbrook's art coordinator, who brought back local artefacts, inspiring the children to make masks and beads.

Links with Ghana have supplemented work by year 6 children, who take part in a model United Nations Assembly.

"They have to speak in role as a chosen country and they have decided to represent Ghana," says Alexander. "One of the UN resolutions is the right of all children to an education. Our pupils are interested in debating child labour within that. They are far more interested in such issues now that Ghana is embedded into the curriculum."

 

Booking Information

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