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Thursday 21 February 2019

Eisteddfod 2019 - Home art competition.

I've been blown away by the quality of entries from my class for the Eisteddfod home art competition. Key Stage 2 were challenged to make 3D models of Welsh landmarks and the entries were awesome. I'm just glad I didn't have to judge the winners from my class!


















The Astronomer's Sun - Film Literacy Project - Making short films

To conclude our half term film literacy project using 'The Astronomer's Sun', the pupils were challenged with making their own short films. We looked at what we thought the main themes of the film were, and decided to use these as a basis for planning our own films.

Due to time constraints at the end of a term which is concluded with our Eisteddfod, I decided to try something different to account for the lack of time available. Last summer, we experimented with the 5x5 shot challenge, making a film where a story is told in 5 shots lasting 5 seconds each. CLICK For this project, I wanted to show a bit more storytelling whilst using the same premise - so I extended the time to 10 seconds, whilst keeping the 5 shot element.

After a creative planning session in their home groups, pupils began planning out their ideas, storyboarding, scripting and allocating roles.
The pupils then took their iPads and dashed around our school site, making their films. They then came into class and used iMovie to edit and publish their efforts.



Here they are:

Bottle rockets

As a culmination to our Stargazers topics, pupils had to make rockets made out of recycled plastic bottles. We wanted to investigate what would happen if we added different elements to our rockets.

Some groups added a range of tail fins and all groups experimented with different nose cones.





We set up our launch pad, attached our cork and inner-tube adapter and connected it to a pump. We then sat back and watch them blow! We launched each rocket three times each so that we could find a mean distance and make it as fair a test as possible.

Here are our rockets in action:

Friday 15 February 2019

We need your help! Which videos go forward to the Eisteddfod competition?

Today, we have been working in pairs within our Eistedffod house colours to make iMovie trailers promoting the best of S4C's children TV. This has come as a culmination of our Teledu topic. The pupils had to choose the best images and phrases to use to promote the channel's TV output for children.

The difficulty we have, is that only one video per house colour will be able to go forward to the Eisteddfod final a week today (22/02/19). We would like you to watch these short adverts and vote for your favourite.

The voting poll is at the bottom of this page after all of the videos.

Ty Coch:


Ty Gwyn:


Ty Gwyrdd:

Friday 8 February 2019

The Astronomer's Sun Film Literacy Project - Week 5

Our fifth week of our film literacy project started off by exploring camera angles and the impact they can have on storytelling. The pupils were given 6 images to identify and then write, in a DVD commentary style about why they were chosen.







Next we had a go at orally retelling the story, camera scene by scene.

Finally, we had a go at turning the dialogue free short into a narrative story. We used screencaps to demarcate paragraphs, with changes in camera shots representing changes in the story.




Tuesday 5 February 2019

Tim Peak exhibition visit and a trip to watch the orchestra

Today we were lucky enough to visit the Tim Peake exhibition at Cardiff museum as part of our Stargazers topic. We were thrilled to see the spacecraft he made his re-entry in as well as the parachute and a spacesuit. CLICK ON THE PICTURES TO MAKE THEM BIGGER.


We then had a good old explore of the museum.


We finished off our day by watching the Royal Welsh Music and Drama College orchestra at St David's Hall.