Language competition success
Published on 18/10/17
As part of our celebrations and activities for European Day of Languages on 26 September, the Year 5 and Year 6 classes took part in an international competition organised by E3 trails who make cross-curricular resources for language learning.
Working in small groups, pupils solved lots of language puzzles using their geography, language and thinking skills. They then went on to complete some tie-breaker statements, including this one: Learning other languages will help me because…
The maturity, thoughtfulness, pragmatism and the wisdom of the children's responses was impressive and what was truly heart-warming was the number of pupils who saw the speaking of someone’s native tongue as a way of offering that person help, support and empathy in difficulty, and not simply focussing on the benefits to themselves. It was therefore particularly exciting to hear that, with our entry, we were runners up in the competition which attracted over 200 entries from schools in the UK and beyond!
The Junior School also participated in a European Day of Languages world record attempt to create the largest collection of videos ever assembled on the theme of languages organised by the Council of Europe. We submitted several short 15 second clips and in the coming weeks some of these may feature here: http://edl.ecml.at/record