World Book Day 2022: Change Sings
This year, all pupils in school used the book Change Sings by Amanda Gorman as a stimulus for their activities. In Birch Class, we read the book and explored the themes and messages together, thinking about how bravely making small changes can change the world and inspire others. As children, we are powerful!
Today our activities included reading, responding and drawing main ideas from the text. We listened to a version set to music and we learned some of it to perform. We even used ukuleles and glockenspiels to play along! Here is us singing the first part of the poem:
I can hear change coming
We looked at key individuals featured in the book, such as Martin Luther King Jr, and created our own power poses. By photographing and tracing these, we created mural art onto mosaic backgrounds we had made using pens and oil pastels. We also made pledges of how we would change the world and added these to musical notes.
Later in the day, we explored the line in the poem, “I don’t make a taller fence but fight to build a better bridge.” As a class, we considered barriers such as war, famine, racism, poverty, discrimination and inequality. We learned about the word ‘oppression’ and came up with some very
sophisticated links to our assembly work on Ukraine and our history topics. We thought about the things that could overcome this ‘fence’ and wrote them onto lolly sticks to create a bridge.
