Year 6  Wales residential

by Ava & Jacob B

A week away from home…

After cramming 24 people’s belongings onto 2 tiny minibuses, we arrived at our destination, Libanus outside of Brecon at 3.30pm.  Before we arrived, we paused for a lunch break at Dyrham park at Bath.  We rolled down a big hill as one of the things from the National Trust’s ’50 things to do before you’re 11 ¾’. Before we actually unpacked, we got our equipment from the stores at the centre so we were ready for the days ahead of us. Unfortunately, I (Jacob) had bag number 13 – unlucky! It took me 3 days before I could figure out how to open it!!

Every day in Wales, we had little snacks such as caramel chocolate biscuit squares, cornflake cake, chocolate cookies and flapjacks. Every child had to make one thing at home but enough for 24 of us (including teachers!) so we could eat them and remind themselves of home. I think if we’d let the children loose a few might have eaten all of them – they were delicious!  We had a Mexican night, an Italian night, soup and sandwich night and a trip to the pub along with a glue stick wedding – more of this later!  After practicing these at school, we cooked all of the meals, even making soup from scratch!

First, we went climbing at Crag y Dinas which is a huge rock face where lots of people go to climb.  Before we began, we had to get our harnesses and learn how to abseil down the rock face so that we knew what to do when we climbed higher. I (Ava) was scared at first but when I got used to it, it became quite easy even though a rock almost fell on me!  We learn about collaborative in school and we all took part in climbing but also supporting each other – we did this really well.

We were instructed next in how to unload canoes off the wagon and down into the water. We canoed past swans with their rather massive cygnets on the canal that runs through Brecon.  We alighted at Storehouse.  Not a lot of our group liked the swans being there but we were fast and we paddled away!  My favourite game we played in the canoe was ‘heads, shoulders, knees and jump’ whilst stood up on the boat.  Mrs Jefferies was right next to me and I jumped so hard she was soaking wet by the time the game ended!  It was fun when Harison, Percy & Zak got stuck in a bush because they couldn’t paddle straight!

A short bus journey dropped us off above Tal-y-Bont reservoir with an amazing view.  We began climbing the mountain and my (Ava) legs were killing me!  We took a picture on a rock at the top where you could see over 40 miles away and there were 2 kestrels gliding in the air around us – it was amazing!  Both the view and the sense of achievement were worth the hard work – we’d never have done something like that before.

We saved the best until last.  On our last day, we caved and waterfall walked. The caving was very tight; we were posted through the letter box, climbed through the ‘lobster pot’ and slid down 2 ‘slides’ where the rock had been made smooth. It was really dark!  Some of our peers were a little nervous at first but we all supported them and they got through in the end.  We took the opportunity to soak our teachers for the last time by pouring the ‘welly juice’ over them when we returned from waterfall walking.  I (Ava) poured it over Miss Morris’ head!!  We scrambled down the gorge into the river and we saw a baby frog!  Through the river we waded until we came to a massive waterfall with a rock so smooth we could slide down it. It was very cold once we put our head under the river but we loved sliding, rolling and screaming in the river.

You might be wondering what a glue stick wedding is?  We named all our gluesticks this year so we’d look after them better and two, Big Mac (bride) and Jeff Jnr (Groom) got married!  Not before our teachers kidnapped them and we had to do a dance and write a poem to get them back!  Our teacher think we’re crazy but we had a lot of fun!

This was an amazing week.  Thanks to all of our teachers who made this happen, we’ll remember it forever.