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.

Video Conferencing. Gearies Infants and Parkhill Juniors Collaborative Project

Traditional Tales with a Twist!

A group of year 6 children at Parkhill have been writing stories "with a twist" for their audience of year 2 children at Gearies Infants. Visit the Gearies and Parkhill Story Blog to read more.