Wales: the red dragon on the flag

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (the mini-series Wales: the land of the dragon, one surprising Welsh story per episode) is a short documentary about the red dragon on the flag of Wales. A single narrator tells the old story behind it: a king's castle walls on a hill fell down every night, a boy (Merlin in later stories) said that two dragons were sleeping under the hill, and when the workers dug, a red dragon and a white dragon woke up and fought, and the red one won. The narrator then shows the real hill today, explains that the flag only became official in 1959, and looks closer at a castle with two flags: there is no dragon on the flag of the United Kingdom, because Wales was already joined to England when it was made. It is a comprehension episode: the narration uses the present simple and the past simple (regular and irregular verbs such as dug, fell, fought and won, and was), the present continuous once (are sleeping), there are, can in a question and the imperatives look and imagine, and no grammar point is taught. Learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app: 7 on facts and 3 on vocabulary (dig, fall down, imagine).

Materials & prerequisites

The folder holds the audio, the slideshow and the script; there is no lesson plan. The pupil pack and the teacher pack (answers highlighted) are one A4 page each, with the text, three photos (the flag of Wales against a blue sky, the wooded hill of the story, a castle with the flag of the United Kingdom and the flag of Wales on two towers), the key words and the 10 questions. The folder also holds a one-page pupil sheet with the 10 questions and a teacher sheet with the answer key. Play the episode twice, hand out the pupil pack, then use the closing question (Imagine a flag for your town. What animal is on it?) for a short class activity: pupils can draw their flag and present it. Learners should know the words king, castle, flag, red, green and white. The dragons belong to a legend, and the episode tells it as a story.

Curriculum alignment

Tagged languages-places-stories (5e, "Des langues, des lieux, des histoires", Cycle 4) and the-united-kingdom (5e, "Le Royaume-Uni"): a Welsh legend behind a national flag. The episode targets CEFR level A2-.