Oliver's Battery Parish Plan Launch Meeting with Input from the Children

On April 1st around 150 residents of Oliver's Battery met at the school for a launch meeting to start working on a parish plan. The hall was very full! 

The children from Oliver's Battery Primary School had provided lots of input to share their ideas and work created by pupils throughout the school was on display at the meeting. The audience listened to several presentations and watched a video made by Woodpeckers class to share their ideas on how Oliver's Battery could be improved. 

The video was very well received and there were lots of comments on how achievable the ideas were. It is clear that the school is seen as an important part of the community and that input is welcome from all age groups. 

The Parish Feedback Video was a fantastic project to bring together the multimedia skills that Dr Gardner has taught Year 3 (Woodpeckers) this year. It was also a valuable opportunity to produce a piece of work with the potential for real impact in the local community. 

After a whole class discussion, each team chose a topic that they felt strongly about. The children then selected, used and combined a variety of multimedia tools to produce the video. The children worked in small teams, taking on the roles of video editors, writers, narrators, illustrators and researchers. 

Every team used Windows Movie Maker Live to edit their video and include photos and some children recorded their voices. Some children chose to work with Microsoft Word or PowerPoint, several drew pictures and then took photos with the LearnPads and included those, some searched for images they could include (and some mastered checking whether they had permission to reuse the images.) 

Icelandic Day - Land of Fire & Ice

Earlier in the year, the topic of the term for years 3 & 4 was Iceland - the Land of Fire and Ice. The children all really enjoyed this, and at the end of the half term all the parents were invited to the school to hear about their findings.

They put on a fantastic afternoon for everyone, and set up the hall as if it was an Icelandic Tourism Information Centre. You could wander freely between exhibits the children had made, and they helped parents to learn Icelandic phrases, and imagine they were planning a trip to Iceland!

Everyone got to watch a volcanic eruption, enjoy Icelandic cakes, look at all the fantastic projects the children had done. There were computer coding animations they'd produced, and at the end we were treated to a traditional Icelandic dance. It was clearly a topic the children enjoyed learning about, and really captured their imagination for pretending we were all going on a trip to Iceland.

Stop Motion Animation by Woodpeckers

Both Woodpeckers classes tried creating stop motion animation for the first time. They had to learn to keep the tablet still and move their characters just a tiny amount at a time.

The 3 Friends
by Charlie, Faith and Caleb

Merry Christmas from Owls Class

Some of Owls Class used the Scratch computer programming environment for the first time. They had a go at creating animated Christmas cards.

Here's Jake's card, click the green flag to start:

If you would like to have a go then visit Scratch Hour of Code Holiday Card Tutorial  and follow the instructions.