A trip to the other side of St Helens, to Oakdene Primary,

I had the fun of working in the ICT suite with both classes I taught through the day. The suite is named the Andrew Schenck ICT Suite in honour of a young lad who, sadly, passed away after fighting leukemia.

I am a big fan of mixing the analogue and the digital and the way Oakdene have set out their suite means that the children can write in their books easily, but also capture their ideas digitally.

I am also a big fan of using GarageBand with children of all ages. It gives them the opportunity of creating sound tracks alongside film. There are many downloadable promo films for the Myst games. These are perfect as a stimulus for a music project. Selecting appropriate timbres, timing sounds to match changes of images, creating a collage of colours within the sound spectrum to enhance the on screen images.

In this case, as yesterday, we used GarageBand to record the children’s voices on multiple audio tracks to accompany a captured film from the games.

Well done indeed to the children of both classes, to teacher Phil Reece for his energetic mucking in during the lessons, and to Helen Lee and her colleagues at Oakdene for a fun-filled day.

I for one am dizzy after such an exhilarating day. For some short excerpts of Year 5’s UNEDITED, FIRST DRAFT writing, read on below:

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