One Drum - African Drumming Workshops For Schools

Hello everyone. I'm sorry that I couldn't post for a while - exams and all that boring school stuff! However, I hope I'll be able to post more frequently now.

This week was AFRICAN WEEK in my school, and we had a variety of workshops each day. Most lessons were African-based and it was really great fun. On Tuesday we had African dancing, while on Wednesday it was African singing for the first half of the afternoon (although we then had to return to our classrooms for some RE, which was not quite as interesting). During lunchtime on Thursday and Friday I was lucky enough to be selected to make African masks to go on display, while Friday morning included my favourite thing of all - African Drumming!

The morning began with a few instructions and some lively playing from Abass and the rest of the drummers from One Drum. We had to hold our drums with our legs and learn two types of taps. The first was to hit the drum hard, right in the centre, which gave a typical drum noise. But when you rapped your hand (rather painfully) onto the side of your drum, it made a quite different sound, which was weirdly metallic. I found this very surprising, but actually preferred it to the first one - it seemed such an unlikely sound to have produced.  

Next we learnt a drum sequence that sounded amazing, but complicated. However, everyone was able to do it by the end of the session and Abass said that we were so good, he'd give us a surprise. It ended up that we had to drum the beat and our poor, unsuspecting teachers had to dance to it. We laughed really hard as Miss H (I won't give her real name as I don't want to embarrass her), kept wiggling her bum in my face!
For the last part of the lesson we did a bit of dancing that involved wiggling our own bottoms, but none of us minded as it was fast and fun. We also asked a few questions and learnt a huge amount about Africa.
I recommend One Drum so much - I had the best drumming experience ever!