Heritage International Day 2025
Heritage International Day 2025, our annual whole school exploration and celebration of countries from around the world, took place last Friday. The Junior School focused on Chile and the children were invited to come dressed in the colours of the Chilean flag: red, white and blue, while Infants explored Brazil and dressed in green, yellow and blue.
In the Senior School, the excitement began at registration with an internationally themed quiz prepared by Head Girl Liberty, who then revealed the answers at the beginning of Assembly and awarded a prize for the winner. Nine pupils from across the year groups had volunteered to prepare presentations on countries of their choice. Highlights included maggoty cheese and an encounter with wild boars in Sardinia, the history and current impact of the state of Pennsylvania, interesting facts on the Vatican City – the smallest country in the world since 1929, the history and traditional dress of South Korea, fun facts about Scotland – plus an inspirational quote from William Wallace, before finishing with a whistle-stop history of Russia.
Infants had fun in the middle of the day with a visit from Eleni’s father and his Brazilian Capoeira group who offered up their time to showcase some capoeira and demonstrate native Brazilian instruments, such as the berimbau, a 5 foot long, single-stringed bow played with a stick and a stone to create different tones and rhythms.
Before home time, Infants and Juniors gathered for a special Assembly to share what they had learned and created. Upper Prep brought the Brazilian carnival spirit, wearing their decorated masks and shaking their maracas as they encouraged everyone to join in with their samba party! Year 2 recalled facts they had enjoyed about the Christ the Redeemer statue, such as that its fingers, head and eyebrows were damaged by a lighting strike in 2008 and that there is a chapel under the statue where people can get married. Year 3 bravely performed the cueca, a traditional Chilean handkerchief style dance. Year 4 told of their afternoon with Mrs Robertson, taking inspiration from examples of Chilean bird pottery to mould their own birds from clay, which they added pattern to with careful carving and painting. Year 5 recounted the story of the 2010 Chilean mining accident, which saw 33 miners rescued from a collapsed mine after 69 days trapped underground. The class had been particularly interested to learn that to escape the miners had to fit into a capsule only 50cm wide. Year 6 baked Chilean bread and apologised for not bringing any to show at Assembly as they had, quite understandably, already eaten it all!
Thank you to all of the staff and volunteers who made this another fun and memorable International Day.
For anyone who may be interested in getting involved with capoeira, this link has all the details of the Cambridge group: https://capoeiracambridge.co.uk
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