Madame Helm (Head of MFL)

This week, BGS celebrated the European Day of Languages (Wednesday 26th September), with a plethora of activities running throughout the whole week.

The European Day of Languages sees a range of events to celebrate all languages organised across Europe: activities for and with children, television and radio programmes, language classes and conferences.

On Monday, our creative pupils and staff took part in a Big International Bake Off. The standard and amount of entries (56 in total) was beyond what we expected. Not only did the creations looked fantastic and original, they also tasted amazing. It was brilliant to see so many pupils and staff involved.

During the week, in form times and in MFL lessons, students and their teachers learnt Italian, Thai, Turkish, Patois, Dutch, Cantonese and Portuguese, to names just a few, as girls volunteered to teach their class a language not taught in school. They prepared some quick enjoyable lessons and all loved learning new greetings or how to count in additional languages.

MFL and English teachers taught some collaborative lessons on the topic of conjugation and tried to break all rules by using foreign languages’ conjugation rules and applying them to English verbs. A Lower Sixth class joined Mrs Barrett’s Year 8 class in this intellectually playful lesson.

Finally students combined their creativity with their knowledge and love of languages by creating ‘Language Stones’, which will help to spread foreign words. The designs have been varied as well as the languages used and we are looking forward to hiding them in different places for others to find. The stones have a message asking people to take a photo and post it on the ‘Language Stones’ page before hiding it again so that we can see how far it travels.