On the beach

Before we went to the beach we looked at photo's of the area that we were going to visit. The photo's were taken over a hundred years ago.

We decided to try and look at what had and hadn't changed. The bay view hotel hadn't changed and the wall along the front was the original wall. We think we stood where the old train station had been. Now the cars are where the track used to be. On the beach there is now a playground which the children enjoyed!

There weren't many people on the beach today but we think that is because there aren't any toilets and people travel to the gower. Paking can be a problem in the area as well, it is easy to park at some of the beaches on the Gower. We looked at the old bridge and it looked very sad and not attractive for people to come to the area. We would like a new bridge to make it easy and safe for children to cross the road. We need good clean toilet facilities and beach shops and cafe's for families. Somewhere to buy buckets and spades, ice creams and kites etc. We were impressed that the beach was nice and clean with not much litter and even saw someone cleaning the beach. The area has so much potential to be used to bring people to the beach, we feel that it wouldn't take much to change it into an area like Mumbles

Video of Playground

Here is a video of the school playground taken by the Family Learning group a few weeks ago.

Rained off!

Even though the rain prevented us from going to the beach as planned we learnt a lot on the PDA and viewed videos and pictures from last session.
We learnt how to copy pictures into word so we were able to write a little text.
We also wrote a letter to the Council about the dog mess in the area. We looked up on the internet what the laws were about dogs in the area and we may email Environmental Health next week.

Out & About

We started the session with a recap of what we had done before half term. We then went outside in the playground, first of all without the children, and looked at what we liked and didn't like about the playground. We liked the flowers and the play area. We didn't like the rocks or the sand but the children loved them!Without the children we practiced taking photo's and video and then taught them how to record.
We ventured outside the school and found an engraved stone about the school when it was enlarged.

We walked around looking at the junior playground, the children liked the junior playground but we thought it was small.

Reporters

Today we learnt about sound and video. We did the sound recording first. when we started we were a bit shy but the more we recorded each other the more confident we became. We got better at using the PDA to record. We each did interviews with everyone in the group, some of us shared the same views.
We asked the following questions;
What is your name?
Where do you live?
What are your hobbies?
Tell me an interesting fact about yourselves?
What do you like about living in St helen's?
What don't you like about living in St helen's

We all agreed that we didn't like the dog mess in the streets of St Helen's

We did video recording but we were more shy talking into the camera than just speaking. We preferred recording the voice than video.

Word Fun

In today's session we used Microsoft word and learnt different ways of writing with the PDA. Most of us liked using the on screen keyboard to type. Transcriber was fun but it came out with some funny words!
The children wrote a short story by completing sentences, here are some examples

We went to folly farm. We went with Miss John and some friends. We wore summer clothes and hats and suncream. We saw Llamas and meercats, they wore big sunglasses. They smelt muddy and horrible.

We went to the park. I went with my mum and dad and my brother. We wore hats. We saw a slide. We also saw ducks swimming in the pond. We fed them some bread. It was fun.

First Lesson a success!!!

The family learning group had their first lesson with the PDA's. After technical problems at the beginning of the lesson we were underway having fun learning all about the PDA's. The group learnt the basics, played the addictive game jawbreaker and mastered taking pictures.