Many hands build a house, many hearts build a school
Welsh Heritage Project 2024
Our Welsh Heritage project was called 'Wales on our doorstep' and is all about our local area, Cynefin and its history. We knew about the Welsh Heritage competition, and we wanted to enter, so our teachers helped us to plan it. This project focus was chosen to increase our sense of Cynefin, and further develop our knowledge and understanding of our local area. Every class in school took part in the project in different ways. Class 1 gave some great ideas for what we could do for this project, as well as help from our teachers.
We have won £800 for our project and were in the top 4 schools in the whole of Wales!
Throughout the project, we met lots of different adults who were experts, had lots of knowledge about a specific area we were looking at:
Mari Fforde from Hay Castle Trust; Author Catherine Barr; Paul Sweeting - Harp player; Connie from Shephard's Ice Cream Parlour; Julie Lewis - local farmer; Dark Skies Stargazing Team; Emily Hill - Illustrator; Mr Bowen from Hay & Brecon Farmers.
Each expert brought new knowledge, sources of information and insights into our project. Working with lots of different experts and people made our project better because we saw how other people explore different types of Welsh heritage. We were able to gain lots of new information from these different people as they all had a different understanding of Hay and the villages around it.
We all had the opportunity to visit the mountain centre in Libanus (near Brecon) from 7.30pm-9.30pm and learnt about the constellations. We were shown them by the professional who used a laser light to shine to the sky. The children who were able to attend, learnt stories about them, viewed through telescopes and saw the planet, Jupiter. It was really lucky that it was a clear night. We felt it was important to be able to experience stargazing as we are lucky enough to live in a Dark Skies reserve area, 1 of only 18 in the world, and our teachers were able to set up an opportunity for us to do so. This is a review of the stargazing experience that many children attended after school one evening in an area of the Brecon Beacons Dark Skies reserve.
Romilly, and her father Karl, wrote this together explaining what the experience involved, what they both learnt and enjoy, as well as how beneficial they found it. Diolch, Romilly!
During this project, we have completed lots of creative activities and experiences that deepened our knowledge of our local area and Cynefin...
Class 2 used their knowledge of the castle to add commentary and text to the existing video that currently plays in the castle’s cellar. We used Adobe Creative to do this and this task really developed our digital competency skills. For example, we learnt how to: split clips; experiment with style, size and layout of texts; add a voiceover and edit our work.
Class 3 decided to completely re-animate the Hay castle film, working in small groups to draw backgrounds, create characters and objects, then use a stop motion app to record each scene before piecing it together. Attention to detail was critical for this task!
We then decided to add our own Foley into our movie too, so we thought carefully about the sounds we’d hear that would match the action in the animation and choose objects or instruments to recreate these sound effects. We worked with a teacher to record each sound effect in time with the animation. We also recorded a Welsh commentary to accompany the film but decided that putting this over the top of the sound effects would detract from the hard work we’d put in recording it. Therefore, our Welsh commentary that details to the listener what each scene within the film shows, can be found linked via QR code with the English translation.
We thought it would be great to show each other what we’d been doing, as each class might not have known what each other were doing. We set up a showcase last Friday afternoon in which we laid out all our work and had time to view everyone in the school’s work. All parents/guardians were invited in on the same afternoon and had time to look at all of our brilliant work, as well as donate to our chosen charity and purchase pieces of work. This made us feel like real artists and entrepreneurs!