Languages Week Scotland 2024 in schools
Find out how schools in Scotland celebrated Languages Week Scotland 2024.
As well as our regular Twitter posts to raise awareness of languages, culture, celebrate success and maintain good health and wellbeing, we did a few other activities this week to celebrate Languages Week Scotland. We asked pupils and teachers to share their opinions on why THEY love languages. We also launched our 5,4,3,2,1 task - this is a great way of checking, brainstorming, creating Spanish and French and also enables active learning, collaborative work and differentiation.
Cross Arthurlie Primary held a number of whole-school projects to celebrate the Week. These included a challenge to design a logo for our new Twitter @XALanguages, a Kahoot quiz with facts about global languages and about our teachers, and a guess the language book quiz. P4 also explored the theme of LWS through their learning on deforestation. We discussed how important it is to listen as well as talk when we are communicating. We set homework challenges where pupils had to explore the origins of items in our houses.
We liaised with the local secondary school who sent Modern Languages staff and senior pupils to deliver lessons, teaching French, Spanish & Portuguese to P5-P7 pupils. Staff all planned lessons centred around developing a culture of language. Lessons ranged from cultural dance, art to appreciating language, and pupils rotated between these. Children reported very positively on their experiences! We also liaised with parents and children in our school who speak another language and empowered them to teach others in our school community. Homework tasks for the week were related to family learning opportunities aimed at celebrating languages!
As a whole school, we have completed a week's worth of fun activities designed to celebrate the different languages spoken in Beancross and the different cultures of our children. One of the teachers developed a grid of activities that work across 1st and 2nd level CfE, spanning Literacy, Modern Languages, Expressive Arts, Numeracy, Social studies, Art and HWB. Every day, classes chose activities and then completed their challenge(s). Every class will get a certificate presented in assembly to celebrate their hard work. Children with EAL and enthusiastic language learners also put on a wonderful Eurovision-style show on Friday. The whole school enjoyed amazing performances in: Yoruba, Ukrainian, Slovak, French, Greek, Urdu, Zulu, Arabic, Afrikaans, Scots and Shona. Performers will receive a special award and badge to mark their achievements and status as language leaders.
We audited the languages spoken across the school. Following this, around 15 P7 children volunteered to deliver a variety of lessons and taster sessions across the school during LWS. They also distributed QR codes of songs in different languages. This inspired other classes to deliver sessions showcasing their own mother-tongue to their own classes. We had a parent helper read Polish stories to classes and we had a BSL volunteer deliver a BSL taster lesson. The information, photos and videos will be displayed in the school and QR codes will allow other children to continue to enjoy them. Two P7 girls are now going to lead a BSL lunchtime club across the school- this is already oversubscribed! A great week was had by all.
S2 are on the topic of Film and TV, so for one of our starter tasks this week we looked at some multilingual actors and actresses. Pupils enjoyed this, and were impressed by these actors' language skills. BGE pupils are also completing a "lingo bingo" challenge sheet for homework, which we hope encourages them to find languages in their local community and have fun with languages!
During Languages Week Scotland, we incorporated new vocabulary from a range of languages across our learning, in as many activities as possible. We listened to lots of familiar stories in different languages and tried to make connections with our knowledge of our own home languages.
