Just a quickie!

....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

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

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...

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.

YGG Amlwch Day 1

Random images of Day 1 in the classrooom. Pupils engaging with the 'Audacity' sound software



Deciding what to do with recorded sound:


Working with Dylan:

Sean explaining 'I can animate' software:


The 'fire, water, rock' drama:






Sean explaining about Anglesey's prehistory and animation teachniques:



Dylan working on creating and editing sound with pupils:

Songs From Stones INSET day at Oriel Mon

We held an INSET day for the Songs From Stones animation project. The learning outcomes of the day were to inform and inspire teachers about Anglesey's prehistory, and to ensure that everybody had the skills necessary to use the animation and sound software in the classroom.

The day was attended by the six primary school teachers - Eleri, Meirion, Osian, Tegwen, Ruth and Kirsty - whose classes are involved in the project, along with Dylan, a Secondary PGCE art student. Ceri Jones, the education officer from Oriel Mon, and Bethan James (Cynnal's Humanties advisor) also attended.

The day was facilitated by Sean Harris (animation artist), Dylan Adams (music workshop leader), and Ken Brassil (Amgueddfa Cymru National Museum of Wales Archaeology education officer).

We began the day with an overview of the Songs From Stones project and original animation, Sean's introduction to the art of animation and the prehistoric sites of Anglesey, and some thought provoking materials provided by Ken Brassil.

Dylan brought lots of energy into the room, along with a wide choice of musical instruments, and we made and recorded some group music.

Dylan started us off by making us play 'follow the leader' with sound - all that syncopated clapping took some keeping up with!

Here are the amazing instruments Dylan brought for us to play with, some of them made very interesting sounds:

We divided into 2 groups and started having fun playing the instruments, before creating a short piece of atmospheric music:

Dylan recorded the music so that we'd have something to edit and add effects to when learning about how to use the 'Audacity' sound software.

After lunch, we moved on to working with the sound and animation software. Dylan worked with individuals and pairs to help everybody get to grips with recording and editing.

Once the tutorials were done, people experimented with the equipment, instruments, and software at their own pace.




Dylan was on hand to help out when needed.

Ken took the opportunity to play with sound, too.

Dylan (the student) got very engrossed, I think he recorded a concerto!



Sean preparing the artwork for the afternoon tutorials:


Explaining how to work with the 'I can animate' software, hardware and artwork to create stop frame animation:

Giving everybody the chance to explore it for themselves:

Overall, a good day was had by all, everybody enjoyed themselves and learnt a great deal. There are things we would change if we did it again, but that is always the case if you care about what you deliver.

Evaluation of the success of the day was done by using 4 'graffiti walls', this is what people felt about their experience, under 4 headings:

Most inspiring

Realising how easy it was to compose effective music as a group (as well as the animation!)

‘I can animate’ software because it was new to me.

Animation

Community sound making

Creating the music as a group

Ancestral links – working in the locality

The two group compositions – they were beautiful!!

Creating music as a group and on the software

All practical, hands on activities

Creating music

The whole afternoon. Brill!

Least inspiring

Audacity software – simply due to the fact that I had used it before – although I did learn some new tricks

More time on the practical aspect, less time talking

Needed more thinking time on group task in the talk period

Too much talk in one chunk

Nothing, sorry! Had a wonderful day!

Too much to absorb too quickly (not the coffee)

N/A x 3

Talks too long

The coffee!

Light Bulb moment?

A new Barclodiad connection with a pupil at school

That I could actually do it – WOW!

To know that the light penetrated the back wall of bryn Celli Ddu on the summer solstice

Ken’s DNA links

The music activities

The wealth of knowledge in morning talks, very good

Using the animation software

Working with teachers on Audacity

Making the musical effects

Group sound making

Working in a group – realising I can do music!

What should we do differently next time?

More hands on activities x 2

More animation x 2

Longer with the software

More hands on with the animation software

Possibly ensure that large group, tutor-led IT sessions are demonstrated to everybody at once using a mnain demo computer and a big screen?

More time to absorb the technology

Less introduction

Less sitting and listening this morning, although some of this of course was necessary