MFL staff celebrated European Day of Languages with some incredible competitions and events.
The events and winners are outlined below:
Cookery Competition – Miss O Wood / Miss E Ogunyemi
An important aspect of Modern Foreign Languages is culture. Food plays a huge part in this! As new members of staff to Sacred Heart this year, we were so impressed by not just the number of entries into the cooking competition, but also the level of enthusiasm and dedication shown by the girls. It really shows their love of learning languages and getting involved in extra-curricular activities.
The competition involved the students collecting a recipe, which was written in a mixture of English and Spanish/French. The girls had to follow their recipes to create either a tortilla or crêpe. The decorating was entirely their own - and we have received lots of amazing and creative designs - such as a Spanish flag crêpe - combining both languages into one!
Competition winners:
Crêpes: Sabine Histed 11LSS - for her ingenious Spanish flag design
Tortilla: Sara Mahmood 8DMG - for photographing all the steps to her amazing tortilla creation, and for making crêpes too!
Teacher Treasure Hunt – Mrs S Willis
Pupils from Years 8 and 9 had great fun taking part in the teacher treasure hunt. Teachers from across the school volunteered to speak a few sentences in a foreign language for one whole day. Pupils had to search for the teacher and then work out what language the teacher was speaking. Pupils were enthused and inspired to hear teachers from a wide range of departments speaking in foreign languages. There were a wide variety of languages spoken, including Scottish Gaelic, French, Spanish and Flemish
Competition winner: Beryl Isaac 9EPH
Passport Competition – Mrs S Thompson
The European Day of Languages Passport was an opportunity for students to put their problem-solving skills to the test! It also made them realise how many English words are 'stolen' from other languages, and therefore how many words from foreign languages they already know. Furthermore, completing the Passport showed students how knowing even just a few words in another language can be beneficial in other subjects, such as science, geography and even English!
Competition winner: Ella McDermott 9SNR
Norwegian Taster Session – Mrs K Russell
A large part of being a successful language-learner is being a ‘language detective’ and making links between languages already known. For North-East natives, Norwegian is a great place to start as it has so many similarities with Geordie and Northumbrian. At lunchtime, a group of intrepid Year 9s were challenged to guess the meanings of various words in Norwegian using their detective skills and they also learnt some greetings, numbers to twenty and some facts about Norway and Norwegian culture
Cross-Curricular Starters – Mrs K Robertson
During lessons, students were able to see how Languages link to their other subject areas through a range of cross-curricular starter activities. Each activity was designed to show students how languages are often connected to their other subjects and how knowing a little of a foreign language could benefit their studies in other areas. Feedback from students was very positive, with many of them not realising how closely interlinked their subjects could be.
Our students thought:
“I really enjoyed making the crêpes with my family! My brother loved eating them. For toppings I decided to use powdered sugar and Nutella! :)" SM
“I loved making the tortillas and even though it was a little hard and it needed my mum’s help cracking the eggs, it was still an amazing experience that I would 100% do again.” SM
In the French crêpe competition, we used a recipe which was in both French and English so we had to practise saying the words in French before cooking - luckily there was a key, so we knew what we were talking about. My friend from another class came to my house especially to cook our crêpes, because my sister has a proper crêpe machine so we used that. We loved making the crêpes - it was so much fun! We particularly loved decorating all the crêpes with the icing and flags. Crêpes are linked to French because there are a lot of French crêpe cafés/ restaurants in France. They are very popular in the French community.
The other students in our teaching group loved our crêpes when Mademoiselle Wood showed them - and even decided to enter the competition themselves!
We enjoyed this activity because it was very fun to make and we enjoyed eating them afterwards! GL, TCH and KS (Y7)