Rio De Vida!

Our Junior School children thoroughly enjoyed their Creative Curriculum studies this half term, where they investigated the theme, Rio De Vida! exploring all things related to Brazil. Their studies culminated in a Carnival which the entire Junior School celebrated in style during the final week.

Throughout the first half of term, girls have been playing with ideas related to Brazil. For instance, in Music studies, they had a Samba drumming workshop, they learned to read and layer rhythms. They created their own rhythms using Garage Band (left) and finally they performed their own Samba rhythms in the Carnival.

In Art, the girls in Years 2, 3 and 4 explored the creative styles of Paul Klee and Modigliani while girls in Years 5 and 6 explored the techniques of Chuck Close. They created portraits and paintings and explored colours. Their Art studies helped the girls in their Design Technology projects where they created their own masks, collages, musical instruments, and even their own clothes, to wear in the Carnival!

The girls became Climate Scientists in Geography and conducted studies of comparative differences between different cities. They even made recommendations for the England football team’s location of their first World Cup match (they had, of course, time-travelled back to 2014!). The older girls looked at the differences between life in Rochinha and Barra di Tijuca, and also looked at the lives of the Amazon’s indigenous people and the threats facing them. Younger girls, meanwhile, looked the physical features of the Amazon rainforest and the effects of deforestation.

Girls also explored the theme in Outdoor Education and Digital Competency. Being able to creatively probe their own ideas using everything from headdresses made of natural materials, which they found in our onsite Woods, to using iMovies, Evernote and chroma-keyed green screen to curate their themed videos, sparks the girls’ natural curiosity for the theme and nurtures their love of learning.

The final Carnival was an explosion of colour, sound, rhythms, dance and sparkles which the girls will always fondly remember.