Madame Helm (Head of MFL)

Last week, the school celebrated the European Day of Languages (Thursday 26th September) with a plethora of activities running throughout the whole week.

The highlight of the week was our Big International Bake Off. The standard of entries was beyond what we expected. Not only did the creations looked fantastic and original, they also tasted amazing as they were shared in form time or in classes. It was brilliant to see so many pupils involved. The students’ concerns about the current political climate were well represented as we received many cakes inspired by various countries such as France, Spain and China.

During the week, in form times and in MFL lessons, students and their teachers learnt Japanese, Polish, Russian, Tamil, Danish, Punjabi, Arabic, Korean, Bengali, to name 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 a foreign language.

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’ Facebook page, before hiding it again so that we can see how far it travels.