Scargill Infants and Parkhill Juniors - New Video Conferencing sessions

The children at Parkhill Juniors have once again been video conferencing with children at Scargill Infant school in Havering. Today a class from Year 3 and a group of Year 6 children took part in two separate video conferences with classes at Scargill Infant School.

Click here to read about how they shared work, read stories and played a guessing game.

National Schools Film and Animation Awards

BFI SouthBank - November 23rd 2009

We were delighted to have been shortlisted for the KS2 Mixed Media category for the above national award.

Mrs Dorling, Mrs Seagrave, Mrs Caroline and the four children who made the film "Water - Making a Difference" travelled to the BFI award ceremony and spent a wonderful afternoon being interviewed, watching the nominated films and being entertained by a magician, beat box artist and freestyle dancers.

The event was sponsored by TAG Learning and Schools Tube and was hosted by Floella Benjamin OBE, Hon D. Litt (Exon). It was a fantastic experience and everyone had a superb time.

Our film did not win the main category but just to be shortlisted in such a high profile competition was reward enough. We will certainly enter the competition again next year.

You can read more about this project in the Blog entry of 29th June.

Click here to watch our film.

London Grid for Learning Primary Schools' Conference 2009

Monday 2nd November 2009

Alison Seagrave and Lesley Caroline were invited to the Emirates Stadium to give a presentation about the work Parkhill Junior has been doing using Video Conferencing.

To our delight we received an award for "Innovative and effective use of LGfL resources or services to enhance learning and attainment". This was in recognition of the work the children have been doing using video conferencing, LGfL resources to support curriculum work and the London MLE (Fronter) to support personalised learning and assessment.

To find out more please click on the pictures.

Thursday 9th July 2009 - Wider Opportunities Showcase

Wider Opportunities Showcase

Ilford Town Hall, 9th July 2009

The Wider Opportunities program is a Government initiative that promises every Primary school child should have the opportunity to learn an instrument. This year, Year 4 have been learning to play the violin and a group of Year 4 children took part in the Wider Opportunities Showcase musical evening at Ilford Town Hall.

The evening featured children from a selection of Redbridge Primary schools playing Fifes, Violas, African Drums, Guitars and Percussion instruments.

It was a fantastic musical evening which everyone enjoyed. Our Year 4 children were superb and gave a wonderful performance of a selection of upbeat tunes and even managed to dance at the same time as playing!

Well done to the Year 4 violin players and the Redbridge Music Service Wider Opportunities teachers, Roberta Sullivan and Rebecca Kantor.

Thursday 18th June – Performing Arts Concert

Performing Arts Concert

We have some extremely talented children at Parkhill who took part in an evening of music and dance.



Children from throughout the school played a variety of different musical instruments, sang and performed a selection of dance styles.

Thursday 2nd July - Video Conference with Sarah Dyer

Video Conference with Sarah Dyer

The children in class 4D and 6C took part in two separate video conferences with Sarah Dyer, author and illustrator of children’s books.

Click here to visit Sarah Dyer’s website.

This event was organised by ArtisanCam and the London Grid for Learning (LGfL).

Click here to visit the ArtisanCam website. This is a great website to visit and find out about Art and Artists.

Click here to visit the LGfL website.

The children were able to speak to Sarah Dyer and Keith Alexander, (from ArtisanCam). They were able to ask Sarah a variety of questions as she talked about her work, showed them her books and even drew a picture. It was a fantastic experience and everyone enjoyed it.

Thanks to Sarah, Keith and everyone at LGfL for this excellent video conference.

Year 4 film - "Making a Difference" 2009

"Water - Making a Difference"

Class 4D were set a task to make a short film using the subject of “Making a Difference” as the theme. The children in Mrs Dorling’s class came up with the main idea of “why we all drink lots of water in school”. They discussed why it was important to keep the brain hydrated and how they use the school water bottles to make sure that they always have drinking water available in class.

Mrs Dorling set a weekend homework task for the children. They had to find out fascinating facts about water and how it is important to human life.

Four children from the class were then chosen to write a film script based on the information from the class homework task. These children also learnt how to use the school video camera equipment and how to transfer the film to an iMac PC and edit the footage using iMovie software.

The children wrote their script using the whiteboard and saved it as a Smartboard file. They had to consider where they would film each section, what would they say, who would be in front of the camera and who would be the camera crew.

The children were also keen to make a short animation using the school water bottles. They filmed a short stop frame sequence using the digital camera and transferred this into Windows Movie Maker. This was then filmed from the screen using the digital video camera so that it could be transferred into iMovie for editing.

They also used Dance EJay software to create their own original music score. They thought about the topic and searched for sound clips that would represent the theme of water.

The children worked together at all times in a friendly co-operative way and were full of ideas on how they wanted to make their film. During the course of filming they were only supervised by adults when they had to move the equipment and props as some of it was heavy, especially the tripod.

The finished result is an extremely professional film and everyone has been impressed at their achievement. Well done to the film makers!

Click here to watch the Film