Refugee Week 2016

Year 8 students got to sample what life is like to be a refugee, fleeing from war-torn countries and experiencing an array of other aspects during Refugee Week, Monday 20th - Friday 24th June 2016. Pictures from the week can be seen above.

Classes such as Design & Technology, Humanities and Expressive and Performing Arts all geared their lessons towards learning about refugees, aiming to make students more aware of what the different causes might be to becoming a refugee. It helped to raise awareness and clear up any misconceptions and negative stereotypes, and asked students to empathise with their plight.

On Friday 24th, all of Year 8 were called into the hall for the culmination of the week, an interactive refugee display with artefacts, virtual camp tours and actors. This gave them the opportunity to ask questions and share what they had learned throughout the week. Students could even fill out their own Asylum form!

The full learning programme consisted of;

• Humanities - looking at the history of Somalian refugees. Students produced a timeline which shows how the lives of Somalia's people have changed within a short period time. The timeline will be a mix of images and emotions, and will end with the students giving real life examples of the dilemmas that Somalia refugees face, for example, stay in their home, go to a refugee camp or travel to Europe. Students then took a risk, packed their belongings and chose which journey to go on, ending the session by finding out what really happened to people . 
• ICT/Computing - producing a poster about themselves, including their likes and dislikes, using Photoshop skills learnt in Year 7.
• Maths - Students looked at some of the different causes of becoming a refugee and were given a mock situation of a natural disaster. Using Maths, they had to rehome the population affected.
• Art - Creating mixed media responses on top of photographs of refugee children.
• Performing Arts - in groups, students used their bodies as shelters and props to make up games that a refugee child could play, also creating rules for these games.
• Photography - creating portraits of famous refugees in the style of Julien Opie.

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