European Languages Day
4th Jan 2019
On the 26th September, Middleton Cheney Primary Academy took part in European Languages Day. This was a day to celebrate and experience different languages spoken across Europe. Each year group chose a different unfamiliar language to focus on and based some classroom activities on learning some key phrases. All the children had great fun experiencing a new language and tried so hard to grasp new vocabulary and tricky pronunciation!
Here is a little insight into what each year group did:
Reception classes looked at a map of the World and talked about different countries. They then discussed how people speak in different languages and the children shared any words in different languages that they knew.
Year 1 learnt to say hello in lots of different European languages. They also looked at some flags of European countries and played a matching game involving these and how to say ‘hello’ in that language.
Year 2 had a visit from fluent Spanish speaker Mrs Groom. Mrs Groom helped Year 2 to learn some key phrases in Spanish such as ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’ and ‘my name is’. They then focused on learning the colours in Spanish, including some very difficult pronunciation, and created their own Spanish rainbow.
Year 3 chose German as their language for the day. They used a woolly mammoth to help them learn and show colours and parts of the body in German.
Year 4, with Mr Williamson and A-level students from Chenderit, also learnt some German.
The children designed their own monster and then learnt how to describe its colour and features such as 3 eyes, 6 arms, 10 legs etc. This was a really fun and engaging way to learn brand new vocabulary; numbers 1-10, colours and body parts. The Year 4 teachers were so impressed with how quickly and enthusiastically the children absorbed this information. It was a very successful collaboration with Chenderit.
In Year 5, Mrs Hammond, who is part Polish, came in and taught the children some greetings. She showed some items and dances and the children handled some beautifully painted wooden eggs from Easter. Mrs Hammond recalled that when she was a child they had to hard boil eggs and paint them themselves but now people can buy ready painted wooden eggs in the shops, which is cheating! She talked about the history and background of the country and taught the children the Polish names for the different colours, reinforced with a game of Polish colours bingo.
The Year 6 classes focused on Italian, working well together to learn some key Italian phrases and tackling some difficult pronunciation too. They worked as teams to complete an Italian phrases puzzle.