On Monday 12th November, year 7/8 students from Mereway’s Double Club project visited the club with their teacher Mrs Jeyes. They undertook a stadium tour and saw behind the scenes of the indoor arena, club shop, bar, committee room and went onto the life member’s balcony to get the best view of the pitch.

They then used the digital photos taken on the tour to create comic strips using the Study Centre’s apple laptops ‘comiclife’ programme. They did a great job and were very creative adding commentary, captions and speech. Afterwards they recorded some match commentary onto ‘garageband’ , a voice recording programme. They could pretend they were players and interviewers. Previously in school, Mrs Jeyes had been working with them on press interviews.

The students were a credit to their school and study centre staff found them polite, well mannered and well behaved. They showed enthusiasm for their work and asked intelligent questions about the club and its players.

Writing sports poetry and talking about sports photos’ action in the style of comentators.

This is what children, parents and school teachers thought about the session held on Parklands’ open evening:

Tiegan: “I thought it was fun interviewing the adults and writing sports poems”

George: “It was fun, I wish I could listen to more music”

Harriet: “It was difficult because my mum doesn’t know anything about sport”

Josh: “My mum was good at helping because she did it all”

Alex: “I had fun working with my mum and interviewing her, she was helpful”

Kieran: “Working with my dad was funny, he made me laugh with weird things”

Tiegan: “We learnt how to record our voices”

Harry: “We learnt how to insert music to go with our voices”

Mr Dicken says “The children are very lucky to have an opportunity to come and use this equipment”

Alexs mum: “I enjoyed today seeing what Alex was learning”

Keiran’s dad: “I found it interesting but Kieran is hard to work with, he was good at commentating”

Jack’s mum: “It was really intersting to see what they do out of school, and glad to see the children are so well behaved out of school”

Mrs Gedney: “I can already tell that their attendance at the sessions are having an impact back in school, they are more confident”

Parklands children took part in a player interview on Wednesday 31st October with Northants cricketer Steven Crook. They asked him many questions, covering topics such as cricket, sports in general, school, personal information, healthy eating, reading and authors, training and cricket equipment. The most facinating conversation the children thought was what Steven called his cricket bats!

Children came up with some great open-ended questions and Steven was happy to chat to them and pose for photos, signing autographs on their finished work. It makes such as huge impact having a ‘real life cricketer/local hero’ at the Study Centre and the children remember it as part of the ‘wow’ factor of their study support sessions.

Afterwards, the pupils used their notes to construct player profiles on the apple mac laptops. They used digital photos, powerpoint, graphics and backgrounds to detail the questions and answers from the interview. They turned notes into creative and informative sentences.

Cedar Road Stadium Tour reflections:

George learnt the playing field is oval

Ella learnt the stadium is 101 years old

Ty learnt 6500 people can fit in the stadium

Ellie thought the session was very interesting and fun because we got to use cameras

Harry thought the session was fantastic because I liked the pictures

Lucas said he thought the tour was wicked, when we went into the locker room

Alex really enjoyed iweb because I liked getting pictures

WEEK 3

The children used their digital photos and described them using as many good adjectives as they could think of. They also took part in some teamwork initiative games. Hoop passing, drainpipe racing and group juggling. This proved how good Cedar Road and Parklands are at working together.

Parklands worked on a cricket world cup geography project, researching cricketing countries and their population, currency, religion, squad members and so on. They used atlas’ and the internet, honing their research skills.