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

Active Week - Monday 8th June - Friday 12th June

Active Week

Active Week is a whole school activity where the emphasis is on being more active through a range of physical activities which are cross curricular with other subject areas.

Monday - 8th June

Years 3, 4 and 5 took part in a Skipping Workshop where they learnt co-ordination and different routines using a skipping rope. They had to work as individuals and in pairs.




Mr Tredoux's Maths group (Year 6) did an activity in the form of an orienteering session, where they had to work in groups solving word problems at different stations around the school field.

Tuesday - 9th June

All year groups were very busy taking part in physical activities throughout the school which included curcuit training and team games.

Mr Tredoux took 10 boys to take part in the Redbridge cricket tournament. They won 3 of the 4 matches they played. Everyone had a very enjoyable afternoon.


Wednesday - 10th June

Today we held a whole school fund raising event called Speed Mark. The children were sponsered for breaking the speed barrier with their immense goal shooting abilities. Each child had three attempts to see how fast they could kick the ball into the goal. Their speeds were electronically recorded and the fastest boy and girl in each class received a medal. The funds from this event will be used to purchase new sporting equipment for the school. Mr Tredoux would like to thank everyone who contributed to this cause. The children thoroughly enjoyed this activity.


The Year 4 children took part in an active afternoon. They played a variety of games including parachute games.

Thursday 11th and Friday 12th June

One Thursday Year 5 went over to the Redbridge Sports Centre for a whole day of activities, which included football, hockey, basketball, street dance, tennis and squash.

On Friday the Year 6 children also went to the Redbridge Sports Centre where the took part in a range of activities.

It was a very enjoyable day. The children took part in activities that they do not usually have the opportunity to try. Both year groups received positive feedback from the Centre on their behaviour and the way they worked co-operatively within their groups.

Microsoft Movie Maker and Advertising

Advertising – how to turn a poster into something more exciting!

The children in Class 6T were asked to plan and create their own advert for a sweet. Their work was to be presented in the form of a poster.

In ICT we discussed how we could transfer this into a short movie using images, effects, transitions, titles and sound.

The children had to create 3 pictures based on the information from their poster and then save these as .jpg files.

They opened Microsoft Movie Maker and imported the pictures. These were then transferred to the timeline.

An opening title and an end credit were added. The children looked at the animated effects they could add to these titles and also the options to change the font style and colour.

They also added animated text to the pictures.

They considered whether or not to add a video effect to a frame and also if a video transition would be appropriate between the pictures.

Lastly they recorded a narrative track to accompany the pictures in the movie.

The children spent an extremely enjoyable afternoon creating their advertising movies and they have commented that they now have a greater understanding of how to use Movie Maker and will be able to use this software at home.

Click on the Posters below to run the movies:-

Advert by Chloe

Advert by Georgia

Advert by Joe

Scargill Infants (Havering) and Parkhill Juniors (Redbridge) Video Conference

Follow this link for more information.

http://www.scargillandparkhill.blogspot.com/

Fronter - Year 5 Homepages

Fronter MLE

We have been using Fronter MLE at Parkhill for approximately one year.

Click here for more information on Fronter.

Our approach to introducing this learning environment was to enrol one year group at a time, starting last year with the Year 4 children.

These current Year 5 children have become accustomed to using Fronter to support ICT and Cross Curricular topics, sending messages, voting, taking on-line tests and participating in forums. It seemed a natural progression to give the children a homepage so that they could publish their own individual ideas to share with the rest of the year group. The children know that they must be careful when publishing any work and must take note of plagiarism and copyright.

This has proved to be extremely popular and Fronter has provided the children with their own safe social network where most of the work on the homepages is published when the children are working on their own home computers.

The children update their homepages regularly and post notification of changes on the Homepage Forum. We have now introduced a “Homepage of the Month” system where the children nominate their favourite homepages and then vote for an overall winner.

Click here to read some of their work:-

Homepage 1

Homepage 2

Homepage 3

Homepage 4

Homepage 5

Homepage 6

Keep watching this post to see the “Homepage of the month” voted by the children.

Year 6 Video Conference with Cranbrook School

The Year 6 story tellers have been video conferencing again with another Redbridge School.

On Friday 6th March the children read their “ Traditional Tales with a Twist” to the reception classes at Cranbrook School.

The stories read were versions of:-
Cinderella
The Three Little Pigs
The Hare and the Tortoise
The Three Billy Goats Gruff

(Click on the links above to read the stories in full).

The children at Cranbrook School were celebrating World Book Day and had dressed up as their favourite book characters. They were able to show off their wonderful costumes and tell us at Parkhill all about World Book Day and their favourite books.

It was a great morning and everyone at Parkhill thoroughly enjoyed the link.

Science Week 9th – 13th February 2009

Science week was a whole school activity week. It aimed to encourage children to embrace all aspects of science through fun hands on activities.

This year the topic for Science weeks was based around “Science that you can do at home”.

Monday

The Amazing Exploding Custard Man demonstrated a wide range of fascinating investigations that the children could do at home and he also blew some custard up!


Year 5’s also began their challenge to balance the largest number of pupils on 4 balloons.

Tuesday

We saw the first of a range of activities supplied by Science Alive. To find out more about Science Alive visit their website on http://www.science-alive.co.uk/. Today the children were learning about the power of water and air and used a robot arm powered by hydraulics.


The Year 3 challenge was to design the largest free standing tower that they could using only spaghetti and marshmallows.

Wednesday

The Science Alive activities for today involved building bridges using only paper and sellotape.

In the afternoon Year 4 were “solving the world’s energy crisis” by building electrical circuits powered by citrus fruit!

Thursday

The school was due to be visited by the Rock Man who was going to helpthe children investigate the different properties of rocks and minerals via a range of fascinating practical activities. Unfortunately the guest speaker had a car accident and was not able to get into school. He will be visiting soon.

Science Alive investigated how to drop eggs without breaking them and compared how this relates to car safety.

Year 6 investigated how to fire projectiles using only vitamin C tablets and water.

Friday

The whole school reviewed the week and shared their investigations with other year groups.

Science Alive repeated favourite activities from the past week in the front entrance hall for everyone to see.

Just 2 Easy

The children in Year 6 have used their LGfL Digital Brain personal on-line storage areas since joining the school in Year 3. They use email, live discussions, forums and belong to courses via this portal.

Part of their ICT cross curricular work is to produce web pages on a variety of topics. Recently we looked at the Just 2 Easy software currently available on the LGfL content grid and thought that it would provide an interesting challenge for the children to produce and publish a webpage using this multimedia word processor.

A group of year 6 children have been using Just 2 Easy in school and at home and have been writing an instruction manual to give to others in their year group.

The children in the year group have been given a science topic to research and next week they will be introduced to Just 2 Easy with a view to producing a webpage using this software. The Just 2 Easy mentors will be able to help their class mates with the creativity and design of their work.

Click here for more information about Just 2 Easy.

Click on the names below to see some of the recently publish Science Webpages that have been created using Just 2 Easy:-

• Materials - created by Chloe
• Reversible and Irreversible Changes - created by Abhirame

Artist in Residence 12th - 17th January 2009

During this week, Parkhill Junior School have been lucky enough to have an Artist in Residence working with Year 6. Each class had a day working with the artist, Miriam Smith-Phillipson, who was trained as a fine artist at Hornsey School of Art in late 1960s where she took her degree. She works in a number of different styles. She likes to work expressively and often combines abstract qualities with figurative form. She regards herself as an artist and educator.

The Year 6 children have been given the opportunity to work with acrylic paint on hardboard. They have been able to manipulate and play with the paint in different ways, improved on controlling their brushwork and they have experimented with mark making.

The remaining days Miriam has been working in the entrance hall on her own painting. Adults and children alike have been fascinated with watching the progress of this piece of art and all classes have been involved in questioning the artist about her work and approaches to it.

Miriam Smith-Phillipson - Community Arts Co-ordinator for Beal High School
“It’s been an amazing week. Everybody was successful and worked really hard”.

ICT Sessions. Using the computer to create a copy of their picture.

Using Revelation Natural Art software the children have started to use the computer mouse to draw their artwork and produce a copy of their picture.

This software offers a variety of drawing media which enabled the children to work with an on screen acrylic paintbrush and mix their own colours, therefore copying the method they used to create the colour pallet for their original pictures.

Click here to find out more about Revelation Natural Art.

Time was taken at the start of the first ICT session to try to manipulate the mouse to achieve the effect of the brush strokes that were so prominent on their artwork.

This was not easy. The initial reaction from some of the children was to draw an outline and fill with colour or just to move the mouse quickly backwards and forwards to place the colour on the screen. This obviously did not create any intensity in the picture. The best impression was achieved by using the mouse in much the same way as the paintbrush, using small movements to build up an area of colour. The children then used the mouse to over-lap this colour with various tints of the original shade to create depth.

The level of concentration was extremely high! Some children were more successful than others but everyone managed to save a document that they could continue to work on.

Update: 8th February 2009

Run the movie below to see the original artwork and the computer generated pictures.

Click here to listen to the children and teachers talking about the Art project.