School No. 3 third grade hosts annual Kenyan marketplace

“I remember when we did this,” Oceanside School No. 3 fifth-grader Sarah Dalton said as she poked her head into Dawn Sharpe’s third-grade class. “It was really fun!”

She saw that the room was lined with a series of tables covered in homemade, colorful wares meant to evoke bits of Kenyan culture that, every year for the past 14 years, Sharpe has tried to impart on her students. Dalton was a part of the same activity when she was in third grade.

The tables represented a Kenyan marketplace, and soon, Sharpe and her students streamed into the room, dressed in traditional Kenyan garb and took their places behind homemade items that they would soon be selling to their fellow students.

The market was part of a larger series of lessons where Sharpe, who is Kenyan, teaches various aspects of the culture including clothing, language, music, food and shelter.

Money raised by the sale goes directly to Heifer International, a global non-profit working to eliminate poverty and hunger. But the hardest part, Sharpe said, was telling her students that they could not buy the items they were selling.