....to say a huge diolch yn fawr iawn pawb! What an absolutely inspiring couple of weeks. I will write more next week when I've a little more time, but just to say you were/are all bendigedig!
Please get in touch if I can help with anything. I have not yet come back down to earth from my visit to the magical, mystical island of Anglesey and its prehistoric portals to the past....nor do I want to come back down to earth!! Sean, Ken and I had a great and marvellous time. Your wonderful music will soon be uploaded to cerddora.com and I look forward to hearing and seeing your new creations!
Thanks again for all your warm and friendly hospitality. Diolch yn fawr.
Hwyl!
Dylan
Thursday 14 May 2009
Sunday 10 May 2009
And so we are done; over a hundred new junior archaeologists, animators, composers and sound engineers later, all hopefully with some sense of ownership of their sites.
Bryn Celli Ddu didn't disappoint - great to stand on top and listen to some very strange rumblings emanate from within! And to the create the longest human time line of the project - all the way back to 5000BC; Harry 2009 to Mairi 5000BC, very nicely mapped by the group.
Over to you now...
Please don't hesitate to get in touch if you're feeling stuck and please keep us updated through this blog with your progress (or trials and tribulations!).
Sean
Saturday 2 May 2009
Hello all
Dylan and I have had a ball in the last ten days! We think we are all on to some very exciting new ways of getting children/young people to engage with these extraordinary places. What we are all doing is, in effect, story telling, and as we all know, these magical sites have extraordinary stories...
Roger Young and James Betts from Kudlian Software (who have developed the wonderful I Can Animate) visited Llangaffo school on Wednesday. Over coffee afterwards in The Bull, Llangefni, they expressed their admiration for what we are achieving together. They learnt loads about their own product by coming to Anglesey and described it all as cutting edge in terms of educational process.
So, hopefully you are all feeling proud of what has been achieved, as well as inspired and excited about what is to come...
Once again, DON'T burden yourselves with a (non-existent) sense of everyone else's expectation - enjoy, explore, don't be afraid to push buttons and experiment and the results will come.
Judging by the children's response, you won't be short of ideas (or technical know-how!)
Really looking forward to seeing the results of your creative experiments!
Sean
My highlights so far;
Spotting Bronze Age hammerstones on Parys Mountain
Wild garlic oatcakes at Din Lligwy (and finding the Barclodiad y Gawres otter is now stuffed and residing at Moelfre school!)
Arthur, King of the Britons (aka Dylan) getting lost at Llyn Cerrig Bach and appearing majestically on the crag top, brandishing Excalibur, to find that his 'subjects' were in fact standing beneath another crag some distance away....
Trance drumming in Barclodiad y Gawres - watching the Yr 4 boys and girls drifting away with their ancestors! We need another session like this so that the Chief Inspector of Monuments can join in...
And of course, looking forward to what Bryn Celli Ddu will bring...
Friday 1 May 2009
YGG Amlwch Day 2 including field tip
The weather was not good on the day we went to Parys Mountain. Sean and Dylan changed the plans for the day so that we ate our picnics in class and went at lunchtime, when the weather was better. We did some more work in the classroom. While the very last group finished learning about animation, the rest of the class thought about sound. We all closed our eyes and listened very carefully for a few minutes. We listed all the sounds we could hear on the whiteboard. Then we thought about which of the sounds we could hear might have been heard by Bronze Age people. We crossed out the ones that they couldn't have heard.
Then we did a class drama, based on the processes used to make copper. 3 people dressed in yellow were chosen to represent the ore.
3 people dressed in red were chosen to represent the flames, which danced around the ore and heated it up. They had fun!
and 3 people dressed in blue were chosen to represent the water used to quench the metal.
We all enjoyed the drama, and Dylan said it would help us remember the things the Bronze Age people needed to make copper.
Dylan told us the story of the red dragon and the white dragon and the castle whose walls kept falling down in the night, and we imagined being underground, and the earth moving. That made us think about stories and how we know about history, and which stories might be real history and which might be imagined. We thought about how hard it was to build things a long time ago, moving big stones with just people and not with machines.
It was quite a short tip on the bus. The rain had stopped, but it was still very windy when we got off the bus.
We met some experts, who told us about copper ore.
They showed us some copper ore, which is a beautiful blue colour, and some of the other special stones that have been found on Parys Mountain.
It was quite a walk from the bus to the part of the mountain that we needed to go to, but we kept stopping on the way to talk about things, so we didn't really notice how far it was.
What a fabulous place. The hills and rocks are all different colours. We went down the hill into the bottom of the mine, pretending we were going back in time.
At the bottom, we talked about the Bronze Age miners and the Victorian miners. The Bronze Age miners used small pieces of wood to 'mine' the copper ore. They pushed the wood into the sides of the hill and set fire to them. Once the burning wood had heated things up, they threw water over the wall, and that made the rock crack. Little bits of charcoal (burned wood) have been found in the walls of the big cave here. The bronze age miners also had 'hammer stones' of harder rock to bash against the softer rock to break it into small enough pieces to melt the ore from. We made some collaborative sound by tapping rocks together, the sounds we made helped us imagine we were miners back in the Bronze Age. Dylan recorded the sounds so that we will be able to use them in our film, if we want to.
We learnt that the pigment that is used to colour paint is made from ground up rock. there are lots of colours of rock at Parys Mountain, and some people tried grinding rock into pigment. Nice colours on the trousers, hope mum wasn't too upset when she saw them at the end of the day!
We found an old mine, and we learnt that you needed copper and tin to make bronze. There is no tin here, and there is no copper in Cornwall, so historians think people used to travel by boat between Cornwall and Anglesey to exchange copper and tin.
Rowing a boat for hundreds of miles is hard work, bronze must have been very important to the Bronze Age people.
There was no money in the Bronze Age, so people exchanged things. We thought that when the Bronze Age copper miners exchanged some copper for tin with miners from Cornwall, they may have had a big party and ceremony to celebrate the successful trade, especially after such a difficult journey . So we made a song from sound, and had a ceremony of our own! Everybody had to bow when the person carrying the ceremonial ore moved past them.
The chief of the 'tin' people accepted the gift of copper ore gracefully.
This visit really helped everybody to imagine what it might have been like to live here and mine copper in the bronze age.
Then we did a class drama, based on the processes used to make copper. 3 people dressed in yellow were chosen to represent the ore.
3 people dressed in red were chosen to represent the flames, which danced around the ore and heated it up. They had fun!
and 3 people dressed in blue were chosen to represent the water used to quench the metal.
We all enjoyed the drama, and Dylan said it would help us remember the things the Bronze Age people needed to make copper.
Dylan told us the story of the red dragon and the white dragon and the castle whose walls kept falling down in the night, and we imagined being underground, and the earth moving. That made us think about stories and how we know about history, and which stories might be real history and which might be imagined. We thought about how hard it was to build things a long time ago, moving big stones with just people and not with machines.
It was quite a short tip on the bus. The rain had stopped, but it was still very windy when we got off the bus.
We met some experts, who told us about copper ore.
They showed us some copper ore, which is a beautiful blue colour, and some of the other special stones that have been found on Parys Mountain.
It was quite a walk from the bus to the part of the mountain that we needed to go to, but we kept stopping on the way to talk about things, so we didn't really notice how far it was.
What a fabulous place. The hills and rocks are all different colours. We went down the hill into the bottom of the mine, pretending we were going back in time.
At the bottom, we talked about the Bronze Age miners and the Victorian miners. The Bronze Age miners used small pieces of wood to 'mine' the copper ore. They pushed the wood into the sides of the hill and set fire to them. Once the burning wood had heated things up, they threw water over the wall, and that made the rock crack. Little bits of charcoal (burned wood) have been found in the walls of the big cave here. The bronze age miners also had 'hammer stones' of harder rock to bash against the softer rock to break it into small enough pieces to melt the ore from. We made some collaborative sound by tapping rocks together, the sounds we made helped us imagine we were miners back in the Bronze Age. Dylan recorded the sounds so that we will be able to use them in our film, if we want to.
We learnt that the pigment that is used to colour paint is made from ground up rock. there are lots of colours of rock at Parys Mountain, and some people tried grinding rock into pigment. Nice colours on the trousers, hope mum wasn't too upset when she saw them at the end of the day!
We found an old mine, and we learnt that you needed copper and tin to make bronze. There is no tin here, and there is no copper in Cornwall, so historians think people used to travel by boat between Cornwall and Anglesey to exchange copper and tin.
Rowing a boat for hundreds of miles is hard work, bronze must have been very important to the Bronze Age people.
There was no money in the Bronze Age, so people exchanged things. We thought that when the Bronze Age copper miners exchanged some copper for tin with miners from Cornwall, they may have had a big party and ceremony to celebrate the successful trade, especially after such a difficult journey . So we made a song from sound, and had a ceremony of our own! Everybody had to bow when the person carrying the ceremonial ore moved past them.
The chief of the 'tin' people accepted the gift of copper ore gracefully.
This visit really helped everybody to imagine what it might have been like to live here and mine copper in the bronze age.
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