February – April 2013 in Shajarat al-Durr Primary School; funded through private donations

This program was organised in collaboration with one of the schools in the neighborhood; Shajarat al-Durr School. It came in response to the recommendations phrased by the residents of al-Khalifa and the stakeholders in the first participatory workshop held in 2012.

Over a period of two months, a team of volunteers met weekly with 5th and 6th primary school children. The children got to learn more about the heritage of their neighbourhood through interactive activities that included:

• Drama, in which they enacted the story of Shajar al-Durr, Egypt’s only female ruler in the Islamic period.
• Craft, in which they learned how to carve geometric patterns in stucco.
• Art, in which they told stories related to heritage in a mix of media.
• An interactive visit to Ibn Tulun Mosque in which they learnt its history through looking for clues in a treasure hunt, putting them together in a jigsaw then expressing what they learnt through storytelling and collage.

This project marks the relocation of Athar Lina into its al- Khalifa premises. The toolkit developed through this project is the first of a number of toolkits developed in the course of our heritage education activities.