As the month of March approaches each year, Jo Weaving, our South Wales franchisee, makes plans to celebrate both of her boy’s birthday’s, and her Dad’s birthday, and, if she is lucky, someone will make plans for her birthday too (as well as Mothering Sunday). Jo goes on to say:

Before we celebrate any of our family birthday’s, living in Wales, we celebrate St David’s Day on 1st March. Each year, we have a home art project to do for school. Over the years we have made badges, sculptures on the beach, woodpeckers & love spoons and lots more. This year we had a home baking competition as well. This is in addition to the School Art, Poetry, Story Writing and Handwriting competitions that the children do in school that all form part of the annual School Eisteddfod. This year, Harrison’s school also ran a making music day as part of their St David’s Day celebrations. I was invited to go into school on St David’s Day and run a percussion workshop which was lots of fun.

The whole of Wales celebrates in style on March 1st, including many groups attended by the 0 – 5 year olds, including Musical Minis South Wales.

We celebrate all week in our classes. We encourage the children to come dressed for the occasion. It’s lovely to see the girls in national costume and we get quite a few rugby players too. We re write our Musical Minis name song to include the greeting of Bore da (good morning) and Prynhawn da (good afternoon). We have a go at singing a few popular Welsh nursery rhymes and Dewi Draig (Dewi Dragon) makes a special appearance from the story bag. At the end of the session each child is given either a Welsh Cake, or a pin on daffodil or leek.

Our aim for Musical Minis’ St David’s Day celebrations is not to teach the children Welsh, there are other similar groups to ours that already do that extremely well, but a little ‘nod’ about the history and the culture of the country we live in.

Musical Minis South Wales has regular bookable classes in Barry, Bridgend and Pontyclun. There are also drop in classes in Barry Island, Cardiff Bay and Maesteg. For more details or to book in click here or email jo@musicalminis.co.uk