Respect for all: Festivals

This activity was used with children in key stage 2, year 6.

Aim

• To develop knowledge and understanding of the diversity of festivals and beliefs that exist in British society.

Activity objectives

• To examine conventions of electronic texts, including the use of text links and navigational links.
• To use an authoring program to organise, refine and present a multimedia page, incorporating images, sounds and text.
• To amend information to meet the needs of an audience.

This activity relates to the scheme of work unit 6a 'Multimedia presentation' and the key stage 2 ICT programme of study, particularly:

• talking about information (1a);
• preparing information for development (1b);
• developing and refining ideas (2a);
• sharing and exchanging information (3a);
• being sensitive to the needs of an audience (3b);
• working with a range of information (5b).

Activity description

As part of a cross-curricular project, the children were asked to produce a multimedia presentation on the theme of festivals and celebrations. The children listed the major festivals celebrated by different faith communities in the UK.

The children collected information from a variety of sources (eg books, photographs, face-to-face interviews). The information they collected included video clips of traditional dances, scanned images (eg photographs of places of worship and artwork) and sound clips, in particular, sound samples of prayers from various religious traditions.

The class examined a CD-ROM and identified features unique to electronic texts. For example, they noted that icons are used for navigation and text links can be clicked to trigger sound files. The children were taught to use the main features of an authoring software package. They were then commissioned to contribute a single page to the overall presentation.

Having produced a first draft of their page, the children were asked to identify any specialist words that they thought might be unfamiliar to a general readership and to write explanations. They were taught how to use a sound sampler and how to incorporate sound files on to their page. They recorded short, spoken explanations to use as text links, then linked the key words and amended the font colour. This led to a talking glossary of culturally specific terminology, describing the main festivals, places of worship and holy books that exist in British society.

The teacher created a multimedia presentation from the individual pages. The finished resource was shared with other classes and with other local schools.

Commentary

Through this project, the children created a resource that increased their knowledge of the range of cultural traditions and beliefs present in Britain today. Having their traditions recognised by the school helped some pupils to develop their self-esteem. The use of the spoken explanations and recording of prayers proved to be a particularly popular way of interacting with the resource. These sound files helped to bring the information to life and ensured that a range of languages and dialects were acknowledged and valued.

Resources

The information and communication technology schemes of work can be found at www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/schemes
The online national curriculum can be found at www.nc.uk.net

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