Gair am Air is a free Welsh vocabulary and grammar tool for learners aged roughly 4 to 16. No accounts, no advertising, no analytics, and nothing leaves the device. This page sets out how it maps to the curriculum, what it does with data, and what it does not claim.
The tool sits within Languages, Literacy and Communication. It contributes directly to two of the four statements of what matters, and incidentally to a third:
| Statement of what matters | How |
|---|---|
| Languages connect us | Directly. Northern and southern forms are taught side by side, and place names are used in their mutated forms, so learners meet Welsh as a living language with regional variation rather than a single fixed register. |
| Understanding languages is key to understanding the world around us | Directly. The mutation engine teaches treigladau as patterns to be understood, not spellings to be memorised, and the parent view explains each rule in plain English. |
| Expressing ourselves through languages is key to communication | Partly. Sentence-level rules (Mae'r … yn …, Mae gen i, negatives, questions) build toward expression, but this is a practice tool, not a speaking or writing programme. |
| Literature fires imagination and inspires creativity | Not addressed. This tool makes no claim here. |
Content is tagged by progression step and shown in the parent view. The mapping is indicative, not official — it is my reading of the descriptions of learning, not a validated alignment.
| Step | Typically | In the tool |
|---|---|---|
| Cam 1 | Nursery, Reception | Pictures-and-sound mode. No written English on screen; the learner hears a word and taps the picture. Switched on per person in the profile panel. |
| Cam 2 | Years 1–3 | Core vocabulary, recognition and letter-tile building. Article mutation and plurals. |
| Cam 3 | Years 4–6 | Free spelling, possessive mutations, gendered numerals, adjective agreement, prepositions. |
| Cam 4 | Years 7–9 | yn / yng / ym with place names, comparatives, negatives, questions, the perfect tense, and opinion sentences. |
| Cam 5 | Years 10–11 | Future and conditional, essay connectives, and the discursive phrases needed for extended writing: ar y llaw arall, o ganlyniad, heb os nac oni bai. |
The Welsh Language and Education (Wales) Act 2025 replaced the old Welsh-first / Welsh-second split with three statutory school categories. The tool asks which one applies and adjusts where each learner starts:
| Category | Minimum Welsh provision | What changes |
|---|---|---|
| Primarily Welsh Language | 80% | Skips recognition entirely. Learners go straight to building and spelling, since meaning is assumed. |
| Dual Language | 50% | One round of recognition, then straight to production. |
| Primarily English Language, partly Welsh | 10% | Full ladder: multiple choice, reversed, letter tiles, then free spelling. |
Vocabulary and rules are also tagged A1, A2 or B1 against the Common European Framework, which is the descriptor system the Act adopts for Welsh. The Act's goal is that learners become independent Welsh users, reaching B1 or B2 and B2 for oral interaction. This tool does not teach speaking, so it contributes to the written and receptive side only.
You should not need a data protection impact assessment to use this. Nothing is collected, transmitted or stored off-device, so there is no processing of learner data by me or by anyone else.
The site is hosted on Netlify, whose servers process IP addresses to deliver pages and defend against attacks, as any web host does. That is the entire third-party chain. The full privacy policy has more.
Built to target WCAG 2.2 level AA. Specifically:
Three known gaps, stated rather than hidden: the picture cues are emoji, which screen readers announce inconsistently across platforms; there is no full audio description of the woven progress display; and inline text links in footers are smaller than 24 pixels, which the standard permits for inline text but which is still worth knowing. If something blocks a learner in your class, please tell me and I will fix it.
There is no single set of adjustments that suits every autistic or ADHD learner, so none are assumed. Every option below is per person, off by default, and set in the profile panel, which means several learners can share one device with completely different settings.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Calm background | Removes the woven pattern behind everything and stops buttons travelling when pressed. The pattern is the app's signature and also its most likely source of visual stress. |
| Focus mode | Hides the toggles, topic row, blanket and cabinet, leaving only the question. One button restores everything. |
| More spacing | Wider letter and word spacing and taller lines. Spacing has better evidence behind it than special typefaces do, so that is what is offered. |
| Questions per round | Five, ten or twenty. Some learners need a shorter commitment; others resent being stopped mid-flow. |
| Answers to choose from | Two, three or four. Four simultaneous choices is a real cost for some learners. |
| Sound, split three ways | Correct, incorrect and end-of-round are separately switchable, as is vibration. |
| Gentle corrections | A wrong answer shows the correction in muted colours with a soft falling tone instead of red and a buzz. |
| Pictures and sound only | No written language at all. Intended for pre-readers, but useful for any learner who finds text a barrier to the listening task. |
What is absent matters as much. No timers, no countdowns, no streaks, no daily targets, no notifications, no leaderboards. Nothing is ever removed for stopping, and a learner returning after a month finds exactly what they left. Trophies only accumulate.
What it deliberately does not do. No streaks, no daily targets, no timers, no notifications, no leaderboards, and nothing that is taken away for stopping. Trophies are collected, never lost. A learner who misses a fortnight returns to exactly what they left.
Word lists, genders, plurals and mutation rules were compiled by me and checked programmatically for internal consistency — every rule is generated against every eligible word in both dialects and tested for correctness. Genders in particular matter, because four grammar rules depend on them, so a wrong gender teaches a wrong mutation every time that word appears.
Honest caveat. I am not a fluent Welsh speaker. The list has been built carefully and tested mechanically, but it has not yet been signed off by a Welsh-medium teacher. If you find an error, please tell me — corrections are made the same week and credited. If you would be willing to review the list properly, I would be extremely glad to hear from you.
Free, permanently, with no premium tier and nothing held back. There is a Buy Me a Coffee link in the parent view and nowhere a child will see it. Use it in class, put it on the school website, send it home with pupils — no permission needed.