Fabulous Venetian Masks created by local children

The 2011 Heacham Summer Activities programme kicked off with an opportunity for the children to learn about family coat of arms.  The Old Friends Hall in Sunnyside was full of coloured cardboard, ribbon and pictures of dragons, lions, unicorns and more.  The children spent a fun morning doing art and craft activities to create their own coat of arms.  Some of the final results were very eye catching indeed.

Next up was the pottery morning where even some very young children (with the help of Mum) got into painting a pottery item of their choice.  My son chose to paint a train money box and he was very pleased at the results.  Others chose to paint a pottery footballer, a football, tortoise and even a perfume bottle.  This activity was run by “Drive U Pottery” who basically come to you with pottery items you can paint.  You just buy the pottery item, paint it and they fire it in the kiln so you get the final product with a professional glazed finish.  The personaable lady who runs “Drive U Pottery” even found time to engage the children in a fun game whilst they were waiting for their friends and siblings to complete their “works of art”.

Creating a coat of arms

Coats of arms for the current generation!

The Venetian Carnival Mask morning produced fabulous results using paints, tissue paper and jewels just before the Heacham Carnival.  I don’t recall seeing any of the masks at the Carnival though so I guess they must be adorning the bedroom walls of their creators.

An array of pottery items to paint

Painting a footballer

Fortunately, the weather obligingly stayed dry for both the Olympic Challenge and the clay pigeoning.  The popular 2 day Olympic Challenge allowed a group of children to participate in a variety of athletic disciplines and face the Olympic style challenge in a modern day mini-pentathlon with medals for the winners.

Mini rifle range

Mini rifle range

There were also two sessions of clay pigeon shooting with Heacham Wildfowlers voluntarily providing their expert instruction many youngsters the art of shooting safely.  The mini rifle range was also available for standard target practice and this was particularly popular with my youngest son who found the recoil of the larger guns a bit too much.

Archery and quick cricket were included in this year’s programme once again.  In addition, new activities were Laser Gaming and the latest craze of Speed Stacking.

Fast cricket

Concentration required for speed stacking!

Speed stacking - the kids get going

Archery

Olympic Medallists 2011

Heacham Wildfowlers - new recruits?

Click here to down load the programme and booking form.

Mad Scientists Workshop

The 2010 Summer Activity Programme began very appropriately with a face mask workshop just prior to Heacham’s Annual Carnival.  This year saw the Summer Activity Programme overlap with the Eagle Sports Academy at Glebe School in Hunstanton to add more variety to the events on offer.

Heacham Wildfowlers  hosted “Young Hot Shots” as  usual and this clay pigeon event proved to be as popular as ever with parents being encouraged to join in as much as the children.  Mad Science Workshop was a new addition to the Summer Activity Programme and a variety of fascinating experiments were carried out by our young scientists!  My children keep asking when the next one is so hopefully this will be retained for next year.

“Beat the Bowler” saw challengers over the age of 8 who had to try and hit the cricket balls “bowled” by the Cricket Club’s new machine.  The ball speeds proved very fast indeed and soon a slower speed was found so that some successful bats could be had.  This proved to be popular among the participants and will no doubt be popular for future Summer Activity Programmes.

Flower Art with the highly talented Heacham Flower Club was a more genteel activity in the Summer’s line up and the youngsters produced some high quality arrangements as a result.

Despite a doubtful start with the weather, the  Archery went ahead with the sun shining on the would-be archers.  It was not long before their tutor had them all hitting their targets and gaining more accuracy and skill as the time wore on.

Olympic Medalists 2010 - James, Tom & Jamie

The Heacham Olympic Challenge was a varied and interesting line up of relay races, javelin throws, balance skills, jumping endurance and sprinting.  Our Olympians were pitted against each other to find out who the overall Olympic Champions were and a point scoring system (with appropriate handicaps) was applied to allow for the differences in age for each contender.  The declared 1st place Olympic Champion was James, 2nd place Tom and 3rd place Jamie.  Each were awarded Gold, Silver and Bronze medals at the close of the “games” and all Olympians were awarded a certificate.

Click here to down load the programme and application form.