These two-hour workshops for Primary years 5 and 6 were supported by Sgrîn and run in partnership with Chapter. They were based on Marc Evans’ film Dal:Yma/Nawr, about two thousand years of the Welsh poetic tradition. The children were provided with a soundtrack – T Llew Jones’ poem Traeth y Pigyn, in the original Welsh or in an English translation. They had a choice of 30 clips taken from the film, and their task was to edit the clips to illustrate the poem.

They played the soundtrack, using iMovie’s ‘Bookmarks’ to mark the beginning of each line. They then chose which images would go with each line of the poem, added them to the Timeline by ‘drag-and-drop’, then dragged the end of each clip to line up with the appropriate bookmark. They then added titles and credits.

The workshops went very well and teachers were surprised and impressed at the high level of language, focused discussion and co-operation demonstrated by the children. A version of the workshop could be comfortably accommodated in an 80-90 minute double lesson.

We ran this workshop in Aberystwyth, Pontardawe and Cardiff in Autumn 2004 and Spring 2005 in Welsh and English.