On Wednesday the 17th of November the year 7 and 8 syndicate had a Cultural day. This day was full of fun activities about the Arts.

First we learnt a Sasa dance that was taught by Ana. A sasa dance is a traditional energetic Samoan dance performed by men and women. It is where dancers reflect activities from their daily life such as paddling, cracking a coconut, making nets and rope, climbing trees and making food and others. I felt excited, joyful, thrilled and happy about learning a new dance and we were all proud of our final product.

After that we went across the road to the Caversham Church. There we met a person named Koffee and his two assistants. He taught us about African drumming and how to play the Djembe. That was the name for the type of drum he taught us to play. We also learnt about all the countries in Africa and if they are in the East, West, South or in The North of Africa.

Koffee taught us how to get different sounds and how to hold the Djembe. . We learnt 3 different beats. One was “Thank you very much for my lunch” the second was “Boom pe boom boom pe” and the final pattern is a bit hard to explain here. Once we had learnt the three sounds to play on the drums we added it to a song. We also got to learn some African dancing. It was heaps of fun and everyone loved it. We were all sad that the session flew by so quickly.

Finally we got to let out creative juices flow. We were allowed to design and produce our own graffiti artwork. Mrs Stephens and Miss Dorne gave us lots of help with this. First we had to create our own stencils. From there we used these to then spray paint through onto wood. When we were spray painting we got to experiment with different colours,and spray paint techniques. We all felt really proud of ourselves once done and everyone was really happy with their final piece. There were all sorts of pictures from stars to butterflies, to michael jordans to ying and yangs. They looked amazing!

By Faumalini and Erena.