A sad day for a number of reasons. It was the last day of the project and we would be travelling to Durban for my father’s funeral. We had breakfast and made an early start to the day having cancelled the accommodation for the Wednesday evening.
We arrived at the Education Department in Cofimvaba on 08:00 as per usual and were soon joined by an excited Sbo. The route we chose took us up and over the mountains past Sidubi Poort. Even Sbo was impressed with the majestic mountain views which were breathtaking.
I was not surprised that Sbo had not visited Keilands as he enquired about it. He confessed that he had been in the Cofimvaba district for 4 years and hod not had the need to either drive to the Sintele area and walk down the mountain and across the river, or driven round to Stutterheim to access the Keilands school.
We arrived at the school having negotiated some serous mountain climbs in a forested area. We were greeted by the principal where the school buildings were constructed by the locals. The ablutions were a modern facebrick but the rest of the buildings very dilapidated. On closer inspection we discovered that the building roof trusses were made from long poles harvested from the forest with a tin roof on top – functional.
The whole school consisted of 55 learners with 15 from Grades 4-6. We set up the table in the space outside the principal’s office while the Lego was shared with the Grades 2-3 classes – 23 in total.
I initiated the discussion with the solar demonstration as there were the usual remnants of a solar panel on the school grounds – minus the panels. This created the link to the Sun, photosynthesis and the flow of energy. Surprisingly enough there was a learner who added the importance of chlorophyll. This worked well as I used to use this as the lead in using the dynamo apparatus which was now non functional. A spare had been ordered from Prague.
After a 90 minute lesson I had to sadly disrupt the Lego class as the learners were having so much fun transforming their creative ides into realistic aretfacts using the Lego bricks.