Hope you’re all having a fantastic time at school, and had a brilliant bank holiday weekend, despite the rubbish weather!

There are loads of new classes joining HF4U at the moment, so this week, as a sort of “WELCOME TO HF4U!” I thought we could take a moment to have a look  at all the cool things to see and do around the website.

Firstly, whilst we’re here, there’s this blog! Which I write myself, every week, telling you what I have been up, showing  you some cool pictures and occasionally shouting out to classes that have been in touch, so keep your peepers peeped, because one week, your class might get a mention!

On top of that, there are loads of cool things to do and games to play over at the ‘Hang Out’ section, like ‘Get Sam Dressed’, where you can dress me up in various uniforms, for whatever job you want me to be doing that day. I reckon I look pretty cool as a firefighter, but there are all kinds of uniforms you can put me in, you can even mix things up! So, you could make me part chef, part fireman and part doctor. Mum said that would make me the perfect man, I think she was joking.

There’s the job selector quiz, where you can find out what the ideal job for you would be, just by answering a couple of simple questions! There’s the job simulator, which gives you an idea of what it would be like to do those jobs, there’s the message board, where you can leave me messages and questions about HF4U, or whatever you like really, your name will appear on the website and you’ll even get a response from me personally!

You can also make your own e-cards on there, which are sort of like a regular birthday/get well soon/Christmas/Eid Mubarak card, but without the expense to your pocket, or the planet. Which is kinda cool.

Over there you can also enter  competitions, look at past winner’s entries and maybe even win yourself some prizes!

Anyway, that’s your guided tour to some of the ace stuff you can do here. If you’re new to HF4U, have a little look around and try it out, if you’ve been on HF4U a while, why not leave a comment here or over on the message board to tell the new guys what your favourite part of HF4U is?

That’s all for now, see you next week!

Have fun!

Sam

First of all, can I say a massive thank you to everyone who has left me a message on the HF4U message board, I always make sure to check them and it’s really brilliant to see how much you’re all enjoying the workshops and the trips and everything else, thank you!

Hope you’re all having fun at school, and getting ready for the bank holiday weekend. This week I’ve been getting really excited about the Olympics! Only 85 days to go now! Did you know that on its way to London, the Olympic flame will be passing through Manchester? Well it will! Let’s just hope it isn’t raining that day, wouldn’t want it to go out!

In fact, it’s travelling all over the UK, 8,000 miles in total, carried by 8,000 different people! Here’s a photo of it, there are 8,000 rings on it, one for each of the people who will carry it! So cool! 

My cousin Alex told me that it will be going past his work when it comes through Manchester city centre, so hopefully he’ll take me along to see it, or get some photos for me!

It’s not just going through the city centre. It’s also passing through Salford, Trafford, Moss Side, Rusholme, Longsight, Levenshulme, Stockport, Ashton-under-Lyne and Oldham. Have a look on the official London 2012 website, you can see a detailed map of the route, maybe it will pass by your house!

I love the Olympics, it’s my favourite, especially the cycling, watching Chris Hoy win 3 gold medals in Beijing four years ago was what got me into it, mum said 3 gold medals was just him being greedy, but I think she was joking. Anyway, he’s competing again this year and I really hope he does well, he trains regularly at the National Cycling Centre and he quite often visits schools in the Manchester area to talk to kids our age about cycling and sport and encourages them to get involved, so he’s basically a local! Can’t wait to cheer him on in the summer! What’s your favourite event at the Olympics? What are you looking forward to about it the most? Tell me all about it in a comment below, I’d love to read them.

Anyway, got to go, all this talk of cycling has made me want to go out for a ride on my bike, so that’s what I’m going to do. Speak to you next week!

Have fun,

Sam.

Hope you’re all having an ace week! I’m really excited to tell you about what I’ve been up to, but before I do, I just want to do a massive shout out to Ms Seddon’s class at Westleigh Methodist Primary School, who have just started HF4U and have got their Frankie and Benny’s WoW trip coming up! Have a brilliant time guys!

How were your weekends? Did you do anything fun? On Saturday I went on a day trip to Liverpool with my mum and my cousin Alex to see some actual GIANTS! Well, not actual giants, but some giant puppets. They were amazing; you might have seen them on the news. To commemorate the centenary of the Titanic’s first and only voyage, a group of French puppeteers called Royal De Luxe were asked to make a massive puppet show that would take place all throughout the city, which is what they did!

There were three puppets in total: the little girl, her pet dog Xolo and the little girl’s uncle. They were ginormous, bigger than some of the buildings, about 50ft tall! Their eyes were made out of lamp-posts and it took over 100 people just to control them, it was all so cool! Here are some photos that Alex took, check them out!

Little Girl Giant

Uncle Giant

Xolo, the Little Girl Giant's dog

Mum said the story was inspired by an actual letter a little girl from Liverpool wrote to her uncle, worrying about her dad who was on board Titanic. The show itself lasted three days. It started on Friday when the little girl woke up in Stanley Park with her dog, and they walked into Liverpool city centre searching for her uncle, right through the streets and amongst the shops! It must have looked like Godzilla or something! On Saturday, the day we went, they found each other, before falling asleep down by the docks , and on Sunday they finally left the city to search for the little girl’s dad on a great big boat along the river Mersey.

It was a fantastic day, we managed to get really close,  everyone seemed to really enjoy it, someone said that in total 600,000 people went along to see them over the weekend. 600,000! Wow! That’s like 8 Old Traffords, all standing in one place!

Seeing them has made me really want to make a puppet show, Alex said he will help me do one this week, it has also really made me want to be a giant, but Alex said he couldn’t really help me with that, Mum said I’d be a giant if I ate more vegetables, but that’s her answer to everything. I’m dead excited about making the puppets though, you should try it! What kind of puppet show would you make?

Anyway, that’s what I did this weekend. Let me know what you got up to in the comments, or if you want to ask me a question, you can do so on the message board, hope to hear from you soon!

Have fun!

Hope your first day back at school after the Easter holidays is going okay, and you’re having fun seeing all your friends again! I’m enjoying finding out what everybody got up to on their week off.

I was really struggling to think of things to blog about this week, so I asked my cousin for help, and he told me it was Daffy Duck’s 75^th birthday today. At first I wasn’t sure who or what he was going on about, but apparently he’s this angry cartoon duck, created way back in 1937 by someone called Tex Avery, and it was his favourite cartoon character when he was my age. 1937! I didn’t realise they even had telly 75 years ago, let alone cartoons!

Here he is, in case you don’t know who it is either…

My cousin got very excited when I told him that I’d never heard of it, and showed me dozens of clips, which turned out to be brilliant!  Really funny and stupid. We had a great afternoon watching them all together on YouTube. Here are a few of my favourites, hope you like them too!

(Click the titles to watch!)

Duck Amuck!

Robin Hood Daffy!

Yankee Doodle Daffy

I’m really glad I asked him now, it’s brilliant learning about new things, isn’t it? Who’s your favourite cartoon character, and why?

Anyway, th-th-th-that’s all folks! Hope you have a brilliant week, don’t forget to send me your comments below, or if you have a short question you’d like to ask, you can always put it up on the message board, I read each and every one!

Have fun!

Sam.

I hope you’re all having a CRACKING time on your school holidays and had an EGGcellent Easter weekend! Sorry about the terrible Easter puns, promise I’ll stop doing them before that YOLK gets old. Sorry.

What did you get up to over the bank holiday weekend? Was it fun? I had a brilliant time! Mum invited the family over for a big garden party, all my cousins were there and we had an ‘Easter egg hunt’, my mum had bought us all one egg each and hidden them somewhere in the garden and we all had to search about, looking for the one with our name on, it was so much fun! I finally found mine under a plant pot down at the bottom of the garden, it was a zebra one! Here’s a photo of it, cool, right?

What kind of egg did you get? Mine made me think about going on safari, how ace would that be!? Riding around in one of those cool jeeps, seeing all the lions and monkeys and elephants, in the wild! Amazing! It would also mean going to Africa, so it would be a lot warmer than here! I really hope I can go on safari one day. What would your dream holiday be?

Anyway, hope you’re all well, don’t forget to tell me all about your Easter holidays in the comments below, or over on the message board and I’ll get back to you as straight away!

Have fun!

Sam.

Hope you’re all having a brilliant time at school, unless course you’re lucky enough to be on your Easter holidays, in which case I hope you’re having an even better time not being at school!

The weather has been ace recently, hasn’t it? What did you get up to whilst it was sunny?

My family decided we should make the most of the sunshine, whilst it lasted, by spending the day at Crosby beach and I’m really glad we did now, it’s gotten so cold this week already, and the man on the news said over the next few days it might even snow, in April! One extreme to the other! Which kind of weather do you prefer, sunshine or snow?

Anyway; we had a great day, Crosby isn’t your normal seaside spot, and there aren’t any arcades or funfairs or hotdog vans. In fact there isn’t much of anything really. I was dead worried it was going to be boring, but on the way my mum told me all about something called ‘Another Place’, which is an art installation by a British man called Anthony Gormley, that’s been all over the world, but now permanently stays on Crosby beach, it’s basically a load of lead statues of the artist himself, planted on the beach, staring out to sea. I know that still sounds pretty boring, but it was actually really cool! The beach itself is huge and you’re allowed to touch the sculptures, and get photos taken with them, some of them had even been dressed up! From a distance they looked really creepy, like zombies invading the ocean, Alex said it was like something from a Dr Who episode! Dylan – my dog – didn’t really know what to make of the statues, he was barking and jumping all around them excitedly as if they were real, my mum said they must remind him of our postman!

Here is a photo we took of the Gormley men, check it out, you can’t really see, but there were loads of them!

It all got me thinking, if I was allowed to make a sculpture, to go on a beach, which would stay there forever, what would it be? I thought it might be fun to have a giant plug shaped one, and a plug hole, so when the tide was out, it looked like all the water had drained away. What kind of beach sculpture would you make?

So that was our day at the beach! Don’t forget to let me know what you’ve been up to in the comments below, or if you have a question about HF4U or about anything in general, you can always pop it up on the message board, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can!

Have fun!

Sam.

One sincerely hopes you all had an absolutely spiffing weekend and thoroughly enjoyed all the glorious sunshine we’ve been having recently.

Sorry, the reason I’m speaking like that, is because The Queen came to visit Manchester on Friday, and I’m still really excited about it! My older cousin Alex actually got to see her!

The visit was part of her ‘Diamond Jubilee’ celebration, which is basically a year long party to mark the 60th anniversary of her being our Queen, 60 years, how mad is that! That’s about 5 times as long as I’ve even been alive! She must really enjoy her job, which job would you like to do for that amount of time?

Alex said it was a brilliant day, he works close to the procession route, so on his lunch break he went and stood with the hundreds of other people who were all waiting to see the Queen drive past. It was a fun atmosphere apparently, everyone was singing the national anthem and carrying little flags, there was even a man dressed from head to foot like the Union Jack! Alex said he looked really warm in it, but also amazingly happy, he said this guy was smiling so much he thought his ears were going to pop off his head!

When the royal cars finally came, everyone waved at her as she slowly drove past and cheered a big “Hooray!” when she waved back at them, Alex even managed to get a photo of her Majesty in her car, he said it was the fanciest one he’d ever seen, and had these special hubcaps with the royal family’s coat of arms on them. Have you ever thought about what your family coat of arms could be? Maybe you could draw one! That would be fun!

Anyway, check out the ace photo my cousin took, he got really close!

After they passed through the city centre, the Queen and Prince Phillip were driven over to Salford, where they officially opened Media City UK and took a tour around the BBC studios, where some of you might have already been to, or might be going to on your WoW visits.  So, even if you didn’t get to see her while she was here, you can always tell people you’ve stood in the same place as royalty! How cool is that?

Anyway, hope you’re all enjoying school this week,  just wanted to share that with you lot. Please leave me a comment below with your own stories about the Queen’s visit, or maybe you just want to tell me about all the fun stuff you’ve been up to recently, either way, I would love to read them! Don’t forget, you can always ping me a short message or question, about anything at all, over on the message board and I’ll get back to you!

Have fun!

Sam.

I hope you’re having a good week at school. It’s turned so cold this week, that I’m sure it’s going to snow soon – I can’t wait, because it seems like we’ve not had any snow at all yet this Winter! I want to make sure I can remember how to build snowmen and have snowball fights, so fingers crossed for it snowing this weekend!

I went into Manchester last weekend to see the Chinese New Year celebrations. I’ve never seen the streets so busy – Chinatown was completely packed. Apparently there were 70,000 people who came along, which is more than they’ve ever had for Chinese New Year – what a massive crowd!

Chinese New Year Fireworks!

It all started off with a 53-metre long paper dragon parading through the streets – that’s longer than 4 and a half buses! It looked amazing. Each year the celebrations begin with a dragon parade, but this year it was extra-special because it is the start of the Year of the Dragon. In the Chinese calendar, each year is represented by an animal, and if you are born in that year, you are supposed to share certain characteristics with that animal. So if you are born in the Year of the Dragon, it is believed that you will grow up to be strong and powerful and wise. Because dragons can breathe fire, you might have a bit of a temper, but dragons also have a hidden soft-spot, so you are also secretly very kind and compassionate to others.

We did a project at school a few years ago about Chinese New Year, and I found out that I was born in the Year of the Pig! At first, I thought this was an insult, but then we found out that the characteristics for the Pig are honesty, sincerity and being helpful, which I think is pretty cool! How about you? – do you know what animal sign you are?

After we watched the dragon parade, there were lots of acrobats and street performers to watch, and traditional chinese music being played on lots of drums and cymbals. One of my favourite parts was when 2 martial arts performers did something called a High Poles Lion Dance. They were in really colourful costumes, and they did lots of really clever leaping and hopping between some really high poles. It was incredible, and the whole crowd was completely amazed. Apparently they had come all the way from China especially to perform in Manchester!

Later on, there was a really cool firework display – check out my photo on the left. You can see lots of Chinese lanterns, and if you look carefully, you can see a firework exploding just around the corner! My cousins Karen and Alex really liked it too – they always try to guess to the colour of the rocket before it explodes. Alex is really good at it!

Finally, before we all went home, we called into one of the Chinese bakeries to get Honey Buns. They are brilliant! Have you ever tried one?

Have Fun!

Sam

Website Job Selector

I hope you’re all having a great start to the new term – I can’t wait for you all to get started on the Higher Futures 4U project! You’re going to have a brilliant time. I hope that you’ll all send me loads of messages on the HF4U website Message Board to tell me how you’re getting on – all you have to do is click on the Hangout Zone, then the Message Board section, and away you go!

I read every message that you send in, and I try to display as many as possible for you to see. I check for new messages every day after school, so don’t worry if your message doesn’t appear immediately. Check again later on, or the next day, and it will probably appear soon! You can send me a message about anything you like – your favourite part of the HF4U workshops, or what your dream job is, or you can even just say hello or send me a joke or something! I’d love to hear from you.

Website Job Simulator

Have you explored the Higher Futures 4U website yet? There are loads of games and competitions in the Hangout Zone. Here is a bit about 2 of my favourites:

The first one is called the Job Selector, where you can answer some questions and find out what a great job might be for you in the future – last time I tried it I got ‘HF4U Worker’ and then ‘Theme Park Manager’, and I’d love to do either of those! My Gran had a go and she got ‘Film Stunt Person’, which she thought was hilarious! Why not have a go yourself, and tell me what it suggests for you?!

The Job Simulator is really fun to explore too. You can click on loads and loads of different professions, and find out lots of interesting facts about that job, such as what sort of person you need to be, and what qualifications you might need to work towards. I’ve just check out Chef because that would be my dream job, and I found out that the salary for a chef who is just starting out is £14,000, which is the same as 28,000 doughnuts! Wow, that’s a lot of doughnuts!

Have Fun!

Sam

I hope you’ve had a great time over the school holidays, and that you’re enjoying the start of 2012! Lots of new classes will be starting Higher Futures 4U over the next couple of weeks, so I just wanted to say Hi and introduce myself! I’m Sam, and I’m at High School at the moment. In my spare time, I help out at the HF4U office.

You’ll soon be getting a letter from me to tell you about the different HF4U activities that you’ll be doing over the next few weeks, and a copy of my CV so you can learn all about me! I also write this blog every week for the Higher Futures 4U website. In it, I let you know what I’ve been up to recently, what the rest of the HF4U team are doing, and I also get to share any news or photos of you doing HF4U activities! So keep an eye on the Blog page – you never know, you might be featuring in it soon!

I hope you have fun exploring the HF4U website – my favourite bit is the HF4U Message Board, where you can write me a message. I love hearing from you, so why not click on the Message Board section of the Hangout Zone and get typing! I read every message that gets submitted, and I try to display as many as possible on the website for everyone to see! I check them every day when I get home from school, so if your message doesn’t appear immediately, don’t worry. Just check back a bit later to see if I’ve updated them!

How many different flavours can you spot?!

Christmas seems ages ago already, but I made sure I saved my favourite Christmas present so that I could show all of you! Check out this photo of what my Gran gave me for Christmas – it’s a tin of Jellybean sweets, and there are 86 different flavours! There is a sheet in the top of the tin which explains all the different flavours, because there are way too many to memorise! It even tells you how to combine different jellybeans into recipes – for example, if you find 2 blueberry ones and 1 buttered popcorn one and eat them in the same mouthful, it tastes just like a Blueberry Muffin. Clever!

There are lots of really unusual flavours that I’ve never had before, like candyfloss and pink grapefruit and toasted marshmallow. Sometimes you have to be careful though – I keep picking one of the green ones thinking it’s going to be apple-flavoured, but then it turns out to be Green Tea, which I really don’t like! And I had one yesterday called Sizzling Cinnamon, which turned out to be incredibly spicy!

Have Fun!

Sam