On Thursday 8th November, year 8 students from Weston Favell’s Double Club project visited the club with their teacher Mr Lucas. They undertook a stadium tour and saw behind the scenes of the indoor arena, club shop, changing rooms, bar, function rooms, committee room and went onto the life member’s balcony to get the best view of the pitch. Mr Lucas knew a lot about the club and was able to share his ‘pearls of wisdom’ with the children and hopefully convert them into cricket fans!

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 work done at school onto ‘garageband’ , a voice recording programme.

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.

This is what the thought about the visit/what they learnt and did:

Lewis: “It was good today because I used the garageband/music programme.”

Barry “The players have their own changing room.”

Amber “I created a comic strip about my day here.”

Colm “It was good as we saw where the cricket players train.”

Sophie “It was fun because we used the laptops.”

Dominique “I thought it was fun walking around, learning about cricket”

Simeon “I liked standing on the balcony as its a long way down.”

Mr Lucas “It was good to see the children very interested in cricket, they worked very well in the centre.”

Myra (mentor) “They worked extremely well”

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”

On Monday 5th November, parents and school staff were invited to come to the study centre for an open evening. They could see the children at work, look around the centre, see the cricket club and take part in the educational activities.

The brief was to write sports poetry using the 5 senses, from the perspective of a player, coach, ball, manager, commentator and so on and describe what you can see, hear feel…. There were some great poems and the children used their voices to act as commentators, discussing speed, tone, content. These were read out and recorded onto the apple laptops using ‘garageband’ and turned into podcasts by adding music and sound effects to suit the poem.

Afterwards, children worked with their parents to describe sports action taking place in photos of rugby, football and cricket. They discussed what was going on using adjectives and sports terminology. Then they had to imagine what had happened before the photo was taken and what would happen after. These disucssions were recorded onto garageband in the form of a sports interview about the photo and game.

This is what the children thought about their ‘family learning’ experience:

Alfie says we have been recording our voices, talking about sports. It was quite hard because to think of things to say

Oliver says Today was fun recording our voices and quite funny accidentally recording something else…..

Marc’s mum kept laughing

Emilia’s Mum didn’t know what she was doing

Sophie’s mum was very good at asking questions

Anna’s Dad was told what to do by her

Headteacher Kay Garett: “It is wonderful to see the children so involved and given so many different opportunities to use exciting technology in a different environment. Our pupils’ confidence in their own abilities is already showing. Thanks to all at the Steelbacks for their hard work and enthusiasm. I cant wait to see the new centre when it is finished.”

Stimpson Avenue, Barry Road, Blackthorn, Standens Barn Primaries

Recently, using their newly-acquired apple skills, Steelbacks students used garage band to record sports poems written from a previous session. They recorded voice, added music and sound effects and saved as a podcast. (some effects were sports related too) They took to it very well considering they had never used macs before. They loved experiementing with the different sounds and altering their voices. We also used some programmes for photos and writing match reports. (iphoto, photobooth)

Open Evening
So many parents and teachers and a head teacher (Stimpson Ave) turned up we could barely fit them in the centre. They assisted the children with their work, asked me and my mentor lots of questions and marvelled at the way the children were ‘totally engaged’ in what they were doing.