Voodoo festival primary resource

This primary resource teaches children about the customs of West Africa’s Voodoo Festival. Discover the official religion of Voodoo, and why followers head to its birthplace, Ouidah, in January. What happens at the festival? What do the participants wear? What are they called?

Pupils will learn about the historical and cultural characteristics of Voodoo and it’s January 10th celebrations in our National Geographic Kids’ Culture primary resource sheet.

The teaching resource can be used in study group tasks for learning about different religions in different countries. It can be used as a printed handout for each pupil to review and annotate, or for display on the interactive whiteboard for class discussion.

Activity: As a class, ask the children to discuss the religion of Voodoo. Do they know anything about it? Why might people think it’s connected to ‘black magic’ or sorcery? Ask children to research more information about the official religion of Voodoo. They could make a factfile of their findings.

Pupils could draw a picture of the Egungun masked figures, or using card and craft material, they could make one of these masks/costumes themselves.

N.B. The following information for mapping the resource documents to the school curriculum is specifically tailored to the English National Curriculum and Scottish Curriculum for Excellence. We are currently working to bring specifically tailored curriculum resource links for our other territories; including South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. If you have any queries about our upcoming curriculum resource links, please email: schools@ngkids.co.uk

This Culture primary resource assists with teaching the following History objectives from the National Curriculum:

• Gain historical perspective by placing their growing knowledge into different contexts, understanding the connections between local, regional, national and international history; between cultural, economic, military, political, religious and social history; and between short- and long-term timescales.

And the following Key Stage 1 Geography objectives from the National Curriculum:

• understand geographical similarities and differences through studying the human and physical geography of a small area of the United Kingdom, and of a small area in a contrasting non-European country

This Culture primary resource assists with teaching the following Social studies objectives from the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence:

• broaden my understanding of the world by learning about human activities and achievements in the past and present

Scottish Curriculum for Excellence Early level Social studies objectives:

• I am aware that different types of evidence can help me to find out about the world around me.

Scottish Curriculum for Excellence Early level Social studies objectives:

• I can discuss issues of the diversity of cultures, values and customs in our society.

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