Immersion afternoon

We had a fantastic immersion afternoon! On the tables we had old photos of Tonyrefail and Cwmlai as well as books on Tonyrefail and extracts from old school log books. We were absolutely fascinated straight away and you can clearly see our enthusiasm in the videos above!

We came up with a variety of names for our topic such as - 

*What is cenefin?

*What is the truth of Tonyrefail?

*What is the mystery of the history of Tonyrefail?

*How do we start from the ground up?

We had a vote and the winner was "What is the mystery of the history of Tonyrefail?" as the majority of us agreed that the history of Tonyrefail is a complete mystery!

Jamboard

We used Jamboard to record all the questions we have about this topic - have a look at how many we came up with!

Jax had a special sticker from our Deputy Head teacher for thinking of so many questions - da iawn Jax!

A special guest speaker - Angharad Spooner (a local historian)

A local historian visited our school to give us a brief history of Tonyrefail and went as far back as 4000 years ago!  There was such a buzz of excitement from all of Year 5 with so many questions.  We had lots of historical artefacts to investigate with a kettle and in iron being just some of them. We loved the photographs shown of old Tonyrefail, maps, bus and train tickets - the list goes on! We then worked on our own, then as a pair and finally as a group to work out how much we remembered from Angharad's talk.

A fabulous morning spent with Huw from Upbeat Music. He showed us Welsh musical instruments such as a Telyn (Welsh harp) and pibgor (which none of us had heard before and sounded a bit like a duck quacking!) We absolutely loved having a go at welsh clog dancing and listening to a tale about Merlin and Huw even perfomed some magic for us - listen to the excitement in the video!

An ex-Cwmlai Pupil - Mr Wayne Richards came to visit

We were so lucky to have Mr Wayne Richards attend our school to talk about his time in Cwmlai. We listened very well and had the chance to practice our note taking skills.

Note taking skills - 

This was our first attempt at note taking and we think we did quite well but agreed that it was quite a difficult skill to master and we would like more practice.

Coedely Colliery

Independently we researched the history of Coedely Colliery and presented our findings in a Powerpoint.

Welsh castles 

The mission of creating a Welsh castle out of recycled materials was the art for our Eisteddfod.  We thoroughly enjoyed the task and eagerly await to see who will be the winner!

Our family tree

For homework, our task was to research and compile our family tree and we were absolutely fascinated with what we found out about our own family.  

Deian discoverd he is related to  royalty! WOW!

Art - Valerie Ganz

We studied the Welsh artist Valerie Ganz from Swansea and recreated her charcoal drawing of "Taking a break". What do you think of our creations?

THIS IS THE ORIGINAL...

Here are some of our creations...

To find out more about Valerie Ganz, please see below..

Austin Davies - an ex miner from Coedely Colliery

We know that March 6th 1984 was the start of the strike and to commemorate the anniversary we had an amazing afternoon, listening and learning about life as a miner in Coedely Colliery. We also took the opportunity to practice our note taking skills again and the majority of us agreed it was a lot easier the second time around! We were so excited to see the real banner that was used by the Coedely miners during the strike in 1984.

Scabs v Pickets

As a class we had a debate on whether we would be a scab or a picket  during the Miners strike of 1984 and gave our reasons. 

Our classroom displays

Welsh Heritage Initiative Assembly

The whole school came together to produce an amazing assembly on what had been learned for the topic "Cynefin Cwmlai". Amy Williams from the Royal Mint came in to judge for the Welsh Heritage Award, We are so proud of the enthusiasm and passion shown from the whole school! WOW WOW WOW! We also had guests of two parent Govenors, Mrs Rees, a Director of the local Trade and  Commerce and an ex Cwmlia pupil from the 1960's. We won't find out until July if we  have won a prize. The first video shows all the displays in each year group and the second video shows our performance for the Cynefin Cwmlai assembly.