Miss King visits Cefn Fforest Primary

Cefn Fforest
Originally uploaded by allanah_k

On Monday 5th January 2009, Miss King and Mini-Dylan came to visit the pupils from Cefn Fforest Primary who had begun the conversation with their friends 13,000 miles away at Appleby School, Nelson New Zealand.
It was a chance to actually say hello face to face rather than over a Skype line with 11 hours difference between each other - actually to meet in the same time zone was fantastic.
Cuddly Kiwi who has many adventures since arriving back in 2006 and has been much loved was handed back to Miss King for his journey back home - we hope to keep up with him when he returns to the classroom in February...... in New Zealand.
After a good walk around the school looking at the excellent displays Miss King and Mr Harrington left on their journey to Caerphilly Castle where it snowed!

Season's Greetings to all

As part of Sharon Toner's Voices of the World Project, in which children from all over the world record messages in their mother tongues ( not easy in Welsh, as we learn it as a second language!!) - we recorded ourselves for December singing 'Jingle Bells', we decided to Voki it ..... enjoy


Get a Voki now!


For the previous month's task we were to record Twinkle Twinkle Little Star-we found it near impossible to find a translation, as a result we present a slightly bi-lingual version of Twinkl Twinkl Seren Fach !!!


Get a Voki now!



Thank You to Voices of the World for giving the pupils of Cefn Fforest Primary School the chance to take part in this great collaborative project :-)

A new start for Year 4 in 2008

As of this Friday (21st December 2007) Mr Harrington will be leaving Cefn Fforest Primary School, after 19 years at the school this will obviously be a big change, not one taken lightly.

Mr H would like to thank all his current class of Year 4 pupils for their willingness to go on the online journey this year with him, and he is sure that you will continue this with your new teacher in January 2008.

This blog will be kept live for a few months, as Mr H is interested in knowing how those embarked on the Myst3 Exile game are getting on - Mr H will post when he completes the game also...... always remember the most important part of any school is not the building, the teachers or, the pupils .................... but the school as a whole community working for each other....................keep blogging.

Mr H signing off. ( for now!)

Myst III The mystery continues.....

In Class 4H we have had a double helping of Myst 3 Exile this week. Due to some additional time in the curriculum as we head towards Christmas, we squeezed in 2 Myst sessions this week.
We agreed many of our moves collaboratively as we explored the world called J'nanin. Above you can see the book that we found inside the tusk which we had to roll the barrel into. The book is called AMATERIA ( it has a distinctive bird design on the cover) we had to work out the combination for a lock first, in order to allow the book to come down for us to look at it.Above you can see a view of the Amateria landscape, it is quite different from the bleak island of J'nanin... several pupils thought it appears have a Chinese feel with many red wooden structures connected by gangways and paths.
We explored Amateria for as long as we could today ..... we were distracted from our set task today, to find out if the tusk with the light gather in front of it contains a book also!Mr Harrington has been doing his own research on this particular tusk - above you can see the tusk door with the coloured lights shining on it. On the door are 5 buttons they have to be pressed in the correct order and you may get inside, if you are lucky!
The order of the buttons is the order in which the lights link is shown below-
yellow
blue
green
red
yellow
purple
red
Take a look at the book inside and visit a new island (or age!).... good luck and we will meet to discuss how you get on on Monday.

Who in the World is looking at us in Cefn Fforest?

The above map depicts: 1,355 visits from 28 Apr 2007 to 18 Nov 2007

This map is normally updated daily (latest: 2007-11-18 07:33:17 GMT)

Sadly in school due to Caerphilly CBC's blocking we cannot see where our blog visitors come from as our ClustrMap is unavailable to us. However this is our most recent map. showing not only that we have had 1,355 visitors since we started on 28th April 2007, but more importantly showing the spread of visitors from around the globe to our small classroom here in the South Wales valleys.
To anyone sceptical about the use of blogging just consider the worldwide 'real audience' that we have for the news and views that we post from our classroom - now that is truly mind blowing.... we hope that Cefn Fforest Primary School will keep on blogging and podcasting in the New Year, after all we do have people out there who follow what we are doing :-)

2 New Voki's

We are part of the Voices of the World Project, started by Sharon Toner from The High School in Dundee. There are now 55 teachers from around the world embarked on monthly projects in which our pupil's voices are heard, many speaking in their own languages. We have recently added 2 contributions - ( a late entry to November- Twinkle Twinkle Little Star -Twinkle Twinkle Seren Fach which we sadly failed to translate into Welsh )


Get a Voki now!


Also we have recorded our December contribution which is Jingle Bells ( also a voki - also recorded in English rather than a complicated Welsh translation!)


Get a Voki now!

NADOLIG LLAWEN A BLWYDDYN NEWYDD DDA

MYST III

We are at present in the middle of an investigation of Myst III The Exile. Over the past 4 weeks we have been using the strange world of Myst's parallel times to help with our creative writing and also our exploration skills.

We have been into the 'tusk' you can see above - going up in the lift to the room at the top , after re-arranging the lift controls.
We saw again the person who stole 'RELEESHAHN' in this room before he teleported again. He told us strangely that he had reset the 3 symbols needed to take us further.Mr H has had a Myst evening (Friday) and has the following information for the pupils who have been so keen that they have gone out and bought their own copies of the software ( at between £3 and £5 excellent value).

* Go back up into the room at the top of the tusk - each of the 3 lights when you approach will allow you to focus on a tusk and fit a symbol into the panel each tusk door (1 for each of the 3)
* Outside focus each of the colour topped lenses - now go back to the point near the shore where you turn the control until the sunlight is focussed onto the sender unit - When yo go to the tusk door with the focus device in front of it now it should be coloured by a rainbow of light from each of the lenses.

That's all for now.... more later.....