We were very proud to be part of the Primary Partners show at the Grand Theatre! We voted and decided to perform songs from the musical Grease! It was so much fun! Some of us had never been to the Grand Theatre before, so were a little nervous about performing, however, we opened the show and were AMAZING! 

Here are some photos of us on and off stage! 

Watch our performance below!

We were so proud to be part of the Primary Dance project again this year at the Taliesin. We worked with Julie, our choreographer, to create a dance based on the work of Keith Haring (see our art work further down on our website page). We overcame our fears of performing on stage and worked with other Primary Schools in Swansea. 

Watch the video we created to accompany our dance below:

We invited some VIP's to attend the show and were so happy that they accepted. Thank you to: 

- Rhodri Jones, Head of Achievement and Partnership Service for City and County of Swansea,

- Alan Brayley Esq VR DL, High Sheriff of West Glamorgan 2023 / 2024, 

- Roccio Cifuentes, Children's commissioner for Wales

- Louise Fleet, His Majesty The King’s, West Glamorgan Lord-Lieutenant 

Alan Brayley with Maddie, Nina and Ruby before our first matinee performance.

Rocio Cifuentes and Louise Fleet with Nina, Maddie, Ruby and Lacey after our first evening performance. 

Our Taliesin art project is based on the work of Keith Haring. Keith was born in 1958, in Pennsylvania, USA. He loved drawing cartoons and visiting museums. When he was 20 years old he moved to New York City and was inspired by graffiti artists. He drew hundreds of drawings on New York’s subway. He got in trouble sometimes for drawing on the subway, but many people loved his art. He carried on drawing because he wanted everyone to experience art.

Keith Haring started becoming famous and had exhibitions in galleries. When the paintings were sold, he often gave the money to children’s charities.

Keith Haring is known for colourful, cartoon artworks and certain characters such as crawling babies, barking dogs and spaceships.

We created our own pieces of art work, inspired by Keith Haring which were displayed in the Taliesin. 

Borfa House Residential May 2023

We spent two nights at Tŷ Borfa, it was the best time! We went rock hopping and climbed down to Culver hole, we visited Three Cliffs Bay, climbing the steepest sand dunes we could find, explored caves and climbed rocks. We had a splash in the sea, roasted marshmallows on the fire, and finished with an ice cream treat! 

See our photo slideshow below! 

We went outside and drew the organs we knew and where we thought they are in our body.

Then we matched organs with their functions.

Click link below to watch use match organs and functions. 

Matching organs and their functions

What could our new topic be?

We found a box in class, full of clues about our new topic. We looked at the clues and discussed what our topic could be .... the body? the heart? keeping fit?

What do you think?

We then created our topic map about what we wanted to find out and what we wanted to do in the different AoLEs. See our topic map at the top of this page.

.     

Before half term, Year 5 & 6 were invited to a live session with 'The How People' and 'Creative Fresh' and they set us a challenge to design a new mural to be painted on the RNLI Lifeguard building in Langland. 

We submitted our wonderful posters as did many other pupils from schools across Swansea. There were only 14 winners places available out of 100s of entries! 

We are very proud to announce that two of our pupils designs were selected as the winning designs! 

​​​​​​​The girls attended a creative workshop with the other winners on Saturday 4th March, they worked with the pupils from other schools and collaborated to make the final design, which Creative Fresh will spray paint onto the building! We can't wait to see it! 

Winning entries

​​​​​​​Saturday creative workshop 

Look at all the entries from our class below.   

We loved reading the story 'Tell me a dragon' by Jackie Morris on World book day. We started by creating our own story using words from the book. Then Mrs Smith read the book to us, we loved hearing about the different dragons. 

We created our own dragons writing descriptions using the book as inspiration. Using the Quiver app we made our dragon worlds come alive, and imported our videos into iMovie to record our voice over. ​​​​​​​Look at out dragons below.  

On March 1st we had a wonderful Eisteddfod celebration! Our first one all together as a school since 2020!

Everyone worked so hard and I'm so proud of you all. 

We entered 4 competitions and below are our winners!

Handwriting winners 

We wrote our Welsh poem ' Mynd i'r Dre' in our best joined up handwriting. 

Story winners

In class we learnt the legend of Branwen through Pie Corbett strategies! See our video in post below.

We then planned and wrote our own legends about the daffodil. Mrs Lecrass found this competition very hard to judge! 

Art winners

We studied the Welsh artist 'Laura Ford' she creates sculptures of mythical creatures. We designed our own mythical creatures and made using air dry clay.

Eisteddfod winners - Têm Melyn! 

Pupils in Years 5 and 6 were invited to enter the Bardic poetry competition. Mrs Lecrass started the Bardic ceremony with 4 bards, and declared peace in the hall. 

Then Mrs Lecrass, called read out the winning poem! 

Blaenymaes Bard of 2023 is Ruby!

After the Eisteddfod, we worked in teams to find the challenge cards! Each card had an addition, subtraction or multiplication challenge. When we solved the challenge card we could exchange for a puzzle piece. It was a race to see which team could make their puzzle first! 

It was lots of fun!!

Teisen Lap

We followed a recipe to make a traditional Welsh treat. We made Teisen Lap! It was very tasty! 

Our first Christmas concert since 2019!!

WOW! What a show! 

I couldn't be any prouder of all the pupils! Here are some photos of our fabulous cast! 

We followed a recipe to make Victoria sponge cakes, we had to measure the ingredients using the weighing scales and read the instructions carefully! 

The Victoria sponge cakes were delicious! We even made a few extras for the teachers! 

We researched toys that children played with in Victorian times, they didn't have gadgets like we have today and gaming consoles! 

One of the toys we found were moving toys, we looked at how they were made and discovered they used a cam mechanism. We designed our own Christmas moving toy! Phil from Swansea Museum heard we were making our own toys and asked us to create instruction manuals that he could use to show other school pupils! 

Our toys were very tricky but we didn't give up! 

#ambitousandcapablelearners     #enterprisingandcreative

A Miner's Problem

Our challenge was to design a working model of a coal mine to lift the coal to the surface. We worked together as teams and were ambitious and capable learners, we problem solved and didn't give up. Julie from XL Wales was very impressed with our working coal mines! 

We visited Big Pit to find out about the lives of miners during the Victorian era. We went down a real MINE! 

It was a little scary going down the mine shaft in the cage, and when we were walking through the mine it was dark but we were lucky because we had a torch on our helmet. During the tour, we turned our torches off to see what it would have been like in Victorian times, it was pitch black, we couldn't even see our hand in front of our face. It must have been very scary being a Victorian child working in the mines. 

In the afternoon, we had a look around the museum and found out how the mines changed over the years. We also saw the shower rooms the miners would have used.

It was a FUN day but we all agreed that childhood today is much better than childhood in Victorian times! 

To begin our topic we visited the Dylan Thomas Theatre to watch the production of 'The Trial of Elgan Jones'. We were part of the Jury and had to listen to Elgan's version of events as well as the other people involved. Elgan was accused of trespassing on Margam estate and MURDER! 

We listened carefully and we found Elgan GUILTY of trespassing because even though he was trying to get food for his family he was illegally poaching on someone else's land. We found him NOT GUILTY of Murder because we don't think he shot the gamekeeper, the gamekeeper had tricked him and planted the broach in his pocket. 

We also went to Swansea Waterfront museum and had a lesson in a Victorian style school with a Victorian teacher. The teachers were cruel in the Victorian times .... not like our teachers today!