Friday, July 07, 2006

Sandcastle Challenge


2006 Sandcastle Challenge

News items these days are very often sad, tragic, annoying, disgraceful etc. In other words "good news" finds it difficult to make the headlines, but today we had an event in South Shields which was just that!

The 2006 Sandcastle Challenge took place on Sandhaven Beach this morning and featured 1,700 children from numerous schools around the north-east. The children were in the 8 to 10 year age groups and had travelled from as far afield as Morpeth and Blyth to the north, Wylam and Bishop Aucland to the west, and Redcar to the south. Schools had submitted up to four teams to take part in the challenge and show off their creative and artistic skills on the beach for this charity event in aid of Children North East and covered by Tyne Tees Television. Each team benefited from the contributions of an assigned designer, architect, or civil engineer to help them optimise their creations, which were judged at around 12.00 noon. This is the twelfth year of the challenge and Gleeson Builders had donated 1000 pounds of prize money to be put up for grabs by the 112 teams taking part.

The challenge was to create a sand sculpture depicting a Great British invention, and among the sculptures on display were a small double decker bus and the concorde airplane, from Mortimer Primary School in South Shields, there were a number of submarines, a spitfire, electric lightbulbs, and a telephone. My personal favourite was the team effort from Oakfield Junior School in Gateshead who used all of their four pitches to great effect by creating a steam train complete with passengers!

Afterwards all of the children were treated to a Punch and Judy show in the Amphitheatre whilst eating their packed lunches.

I had asked one of the teachers present if they had spotted Cllr. Jimmy Foreman there, but apparently he prefers the full blown school dinner rather than the boxed "light lunch".

Curly would like to say a big well done to all of the schools and children who took part, and big thank you to the construction professionals who helped each school achieve it's potential.

Click thumbnails to enlarge.



Link

Council Press Release

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Curly
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