Feedback from a Year 6 teacher
at a Primary school in Newport

Here is an outline of the elements that we have used in our Welsh Fortnight when working with Yr 6 and "Nia and the Magic of the Lake."

We used words from the text to learn spelling patterns. We discussed bullying and formed opinions. We then studied a variety of problem situations involving bullying and peer pressure, writing bullet points to give clear guidelines for dealing with bullies. The children chose one incident of bullying and wrote a positive response for the victim.

We studied a selection of settings from the story and the children described their favourite place, somewhere they would like to go alone. The results were spectacular!

The children did a reading comprehension "The Attack" about a bully who got his come-uppance. They told the story of "Nia and the Magic of the Lake" in their own words as the Eisteddfod writing competition. This involved redrafting. We used the poem "Old Men of Magic" as the handwriting competition.

Finally, we used the Book Review sheet from the Teachers' Pack to enable the children to give opinions with evidence or recommendations. We used I.T. skills such as word processing, clip-art and adding borders.

The icing on the cake was the watercolour paintings that they have done of Myddfai.

It has been the most successful Welsh Fortnight to date and we are looking forward to our Eisteddfod and your visit.