Category: EDL

Today I attended the Trent and Tame Language Hub (TTLH) Primary Launch Event and was asked to share some ideas for European Day of Languages.

I’ve posted a few ideas in the past on my website – have a look at using a song or the Omniglot website – but felt it might be useful if I wrote up some of the ideas I shared in one place for those who weren’t there, and for those who were but would like a reminder!

European Day of Languages or EdoL (over recent years the o has been added to avoid misunderstanding!) is celebrated each year on 26th September. It is a Council of Europe initiative and has been running since 2001 and is celebrated across Europe with the aim to promote plurilingualism. Each year there is a focus. This year it is Languages for Peace. You can find out more on the website https://edl.ecml.at/ where there are competitions, resources and opportunities to join with learners across Europe to celebrate our linguistic diversity. This year they include the pronunciation of Irish names and a summary of Words of the Year from various countries. In previous years we’ve used Lara’s Journey and also quests involving the language stickers that are associated with the event.

September 26th isn’t far off the start of the school year so you need to plan ahead, even before you break up for the summer. There are lots of quick ideas that you can use to celebrate that can be the launchpad to bigger/wider initiatives. This is one (the only?) advantage of how soon in the school year it occurs. Below are a few that could create a buzz that can then be built upon.

Expanding on a few of those
– you can read about what happened at my school when we each class chose a language in this post from 2008! If you need some help with different languages, the Digital Dialects website is amazing. Also tap into languages known in your school community and ask children, parents and neighbours if they could support you.
– when dressing up, rather than ending up with a legion of French onion sellers and sevillanas dancers, why not ask learners to dress in the colours of or as the flag of a country, or in the national dress of that country, or as a famous person from that country. Stereotypes are worth discussing but not reinforcing!

Holding a Bake Off is great fun. We did it a few years ago and I had the pleasure of tasting every one of the more than 50 entries! The brief was to create a bake that either represented a country (flag, colours, in the shape of etc) or that came from another country. As you can see if you watch the compilation videos below, we had some amazing entries and the children really enjoyed it. They do love a competition! It was a shame that we couldn’t let the children eat the cakes due to allergy worries but children took them home (apart from the ones that made it to the staffroom!) It was lovely to see creativity in action but also to celebrate some traditional bakes from Sweden, Germany, Australia, Spain and India.

Another idea that worked well and also had a huge impact on the school was around celebrating linguistic identity and the ‘superpowers’ of many of our learners who already know two or more languages before they learn Spanish with us.

We used the Language Profile template on the Multilingualism in schools website and asked chidlren to consider their linguistic identity – whihc languages do they speak, have they experienced, do they feel a connection with or simply like or enjoy learning? Initially it seemed to many that they only wanted to add English but having talked about it with others, all sorts of feelings came to the surface including solidarity with eTwinning project partners, languages related to reading matter, and some interesting thoughts about being bilingual! This was coupled with finding out which languages were spoken by the children and adults in each class, and the creation of a poster for the door. This led to children learning that there weren’t the only speaker of their home language, and also the revelation of some hitherto unknown skills! Both of these activities feed well into Cultural Capital, British values and celebrating our diversity, all very high on the primary curriculum agenda.

Another idea on a similar theme is to hold a Celebration of Languages in which the learners are invited to share. We’ve had several of these, most recently as you can see above on Mother Language Day. Each time we’ve held the event we’ve had a mixture of songs and rhymes, role plays and greetings and even a clapping game this time. Sometimes children share their home language, sometimes a language that they’re learning or that is ‘in the family’ and sometimes learners have learned something specifically for the event. It takes guts to stand in front of your peers and speak, and I am often struck by how often children who are reluctant to speak in class volunteer to share. It’s quite humbling to see how they value these special language opportunities!

Perhaps you want an activity that can be completed over a week, a little at a time, or that can be set as a homework task, or even a competition. The British Council has a Great Languages Challenge that can be downloaded from the Resource section of their website. As you can see from the image above, it’s available in a language non-specific version as well as one for Spanish, French, German, Arabic, Irish, Mandarin and Welsh. You could ask classes to complete it with learners or groups of learners assigned certain tasks, or set levels for the number of tasks completed eg Bronze might be 8-12, Silver more than 13-17 and Gold for 19 or 20 of the 20 tasks. We awarded certificates for all attempts and small prizes like stickers, pencils, rubbers with books for those who had completed the task independently. We also celebrated and shared in assembly including a memorable rendition of Happy Birthday in Yoruba! Activities like this can count towards a British Council International School Award (ISA). You can find out more about how the requirement and how to apply (it’s free!) on the website but feel free to comment or message me if you need support as I’m a British Council Ambassador and have been trhough the process several times, most recently in 2022.

Last year the Global School Alliance held a competition to celebrate EdoL, asking learners to complete the sentence ‘For me, learning a language is…’ in any way that they wanted – using art, video, poem or song, writing an essay or creating a poster. Entries were uploaded to the GSA platform so all participating schools could share the results, and an award ceremony was held online to celebrate and congratulate the participants and winners. Some of the entries were amazing, and I was overjoyed that two of my pupils earned a ‘special mention’ in the Primary category for their entries. You can watch the video below – our bit is at 24 minutes! I’m sure that there will be another event in 2024 so keep your eye on https://www.globalschoolalliance.com/ for news. However, there’s nothing to stop you holding your own competition with the same sentence to be completed!

Perhaps you’d like to use EDoL to dip your toe into cross country links. A good way to do that is to explore the Global School Alliance. Once registered you can browse other registered schools, look at project ideas or post your own. It’s an excellent way to find a partner (or more!) for a short exchange – perhaps you could exchange a culture postcard from your schools, or meet online to teach other greetings, or work on a common theme of peace for example. The initial activity might be so successful that you want to take it further but equally it could be that short!

Let’s be honest, school life is busy and it’s not always easy to plan and/or fit in activities that can be done by classes but each year I make sure that we at least hold an assembly that celebrates EDoL. In fact, it’s now on the school calendar so I have little choice! If we’ve held a day or week of activities, we share what we have done and celebrate our learning. I’ve mentioned above our Celebrations of Language but we’ve also had ones that have been done in classes based around books – can you identify the titles of these books and the languages in which they’re written?

This year I took inspiration from the British Council resource Let’s Talk about Languages which begins with a song fromThe Little Mermaid in many different languages then has a guessing game based on the (literal) meaning of a variety of words including barbe à papa (Dad’s beard – candyfloss in French) and buwchgochgota (short red cow – ladybird in Welsh) I was inspired to continue on this theme and explore favourite words in English as well as other languages.

I shared some of mine – serendipity (English) and burbuja (Spanish for bubble) because I love the sound of the words, the untranslatable pesado in Spanish and so on. I was helped by a couple of books I have called What a Wonderful Word! and What a Wonderful Phrase! that revealed words like poronkusema which is the distance that a reindeer can walk without needing a wee (a popular revelation!) I asked staff for their favourite words and several shared, and then asked the children for theirs. Some had an immediate idea but I invited anyone who wanted to share their word to write it down and give it to me during the week. Below are some that I collated for an article I wrote about it for Languages Today, published by ALL.

There are many more things you could do to celebrate. I haven’t decided how we will mark EDoL in September yet but perhaps I’ll go back to past post and explore Silbo Gomero, a whistling language that is used on La Gomera. Whatever we do, I’m glad of the prompt to have a think and start planning.

If you have any ideas, feel free to leave them in the comments below.

I’ll leave you with a couple of links to other people who’ve shared ideas and a video that could be used as an introduction to the day.
Nattalingo
Teaching Ideas (Some lovely ways of making it really cross curricular

And the answers:
We’re going on a bear hunt – Greek
The Hungry Caterpillar – Punjabi
Room on a broom – Italian
The Three Billy Goats Gruff – Turkish
Mr Tickle – Portuguese

Happy European Day of Languages.

Here’s an idea of what you might do if you hadn’t planned anything and want to do something!

This map was published on the Oxford Dictionaries blog last week for World Gratitude Day and features over 20 ways to say thank you from around the world.

Why not try out a few different ways to be grateful today.

And if that’s not enough,this site has more words, and even tells you if it’s formal or informal!

And here’s a video to help too!

httpv://youtu.be/xP_A_9A4NUw

Last Friday 26th September was European Day of Languages and, after very successful celebrations last year, Whitehouse Common decided to celebrate once more!

Not content with one day, we had a week of activities with each class doing at least one language based activity during the week, assemblies focussing on awareness of other languages and special attention being paid to intercultural understanding. We invited parents to volunteer their language skills – 9 parents / grandparents volunteered with others saying they would’ve done but it was not a good time.. So we had visits from relatives to tell various classes about Punjabi, Greek, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and Basque. Sadly, I wasn’t able to stay for any of them – I’m particularly peeved about the Basque as I still only know one word – goodbye! However, the pupils were buzzing about it. And the lovely thing for me was that the children whose parents had come in are all usually quite timid and having their languages celebrated brought them out of their shells – one teacher siad that a particular child was ‘glowing’ – that, for me, is what it’s all about.

The week culminated on Friday with special assemblies at which each class presented what they had done during the week. We had Reception spelling out the school name in hieroglyphics, Year 1 singing in Spanish, one Year 2 class singing in German and the other counting to ten in Japanese and conducting an exacting Spanish quiz! Year 3 celebrated the languages spoken by the families of pupils in the class by greeting us in their languages, and the other class counted to 10 in Punjabi, Urdu, Gujerati, Chinese German and Spanish. Year 4 had used my del.icio.us bookmarks (at last someone has listened to me!!!) and found the wonderful Italian song written by Mark Pentleton which they sang with great gusto. The Year 5 classes had researched different languages and the countries that spoke them.

Year 6 rounded off our assemblies (we had two – A and B team) with lusty song! 6VH had researched Chinese characters and written their names in Chinese script with their classteacher, but felt that this was not enough so had begged me to teach them a song to go with it. So what did I teach them? what do you think!! La Vaca Lola! We made up actions that involved 70s disco dancing, Makaton and bum wiggling – and it was a hit (not easy to do in a Sevillanas dress I can tell you!) 6JF concluded the other assembly with an unusual choice of language, but one of which I have only myself to blame! When I sent links for EDL to staff, I suggested, tongue in cheek, that someone might like to learn to talk like a pirate. So they did! And sang like pirates too!

We had so much fun that there was almost no time to judge the international fancy dress contest! We had lots of footballers, some Greeks and Romans, countless mini flamenco dancers – christened the ‘MiniMes’ as they wee all dressed like me in miniature! – and a couple of bullfighters, some Italian icecream and pizza salemen, a Chinese dragon, Big Ben, an English rose, Japanese girls, Russian cossacks, a Scottish lassie complete with bagpipes, Carmen Miranda and a Dutch boy in clogs. (Did you know that there are little hole sin the side of clogs to allow the sweat to drain away?!) So hard to judge – I felt really mean, but everyone got a sticker and a round of applause.

I love EDL – so much that I went in on my day off. I see my job as PLL coordinator as being more than teaching Spanish, but as one of encouraging the school family to celebrate and share the languages they know, and to enable them to learn more. I always learn so much from the pupils on such days, and I’ve yet to find a child who has not experienced great delight at trying to teach me words in their language only to find that I can’t immediately or consistently get it right!

On European Day of Languages, I thought I’d join with busuu.com and do my bit for the language of a small Spanish island called Gomera which is danger or extinction. Perhaps you’d like to do your bit too? Watch the video below, then look at Silbo Gomero units on Busuu.com. Then you too will be able to communicate in this unique ancient language that can be heard from 8km away.

Having spent a good while flicking between Youtube and Zamzar over the last couple of days, I’ve had a chance to look over some of my ‘favourited’ videos once more, and came across this one.

I remember They Might Be Giants from their song Birdhouse in your soul – classic lyrics including ‘blue canary in the outlet by the lightswitch who watches over you’ and ‘not to put too fine a point on it, say I’m the only bee in your bonnet’ – and It’s Istanbul not Constantinople – but here they are singing a song about the Alphabet of Nations. They cheat for X but otherwise a country for each letter.

I was thinking of using it as a challenge for European Day of Languages – some ideas:

• learning the song would be the simplest
• play the song each day for a week then have a quiz on countries
• name the languages spoken in the countries
• name the capital cities
• challenge pupils to label the countries on a map
• pupils rewrite the song with countries of their choice
• write a collaborative Alphabet of Languages – then learn a word in each language

Doesn’t have to be for EDL – it would be a good exercise for global awareness and ICU at any point.

There is an Animaniacs video naming countries too, but I prefer this one as it’s shorter, less dated (in terms of look and also countries that no longer exist) and also funkier. ;o)

I came across Omniglot the other day and bookmarked it in my del.icio.us account for further investigation.
Omniglot is ‘a guide to the languages, alphabets, syllabaries and other writing systems of the world’.

You can find out information about a myraid of languages including ones I’ve never heard of!

It’s fascinating to look at all the different writing systems both real – some Mayanscript

and some imaginary – some Klingon!

There are tips on language learning, as well as a multilingual bookstore and articles on languages.

In fact, there’s so much on there that it’s hard to do it justice in a blogpost so I’d encourage you to look for yourself. However, here are three of my favourite parts.

1. Language related art
This is a piece of art by Venantius Pinto based on the Torcharian script and there are links to other examples of artwork such as Mike O’Connell‘s artwork featuring a number of different scripts and Peggy Shearn who is inspired by language and writing systems (see also below)

2. Useful foreign phrases
Ever wanted to know how to say ‘Please speak more slowly’ in Estonian?

Palun rääkige aeglasemalt

Or ‘Where’s the toilet?’ if you’re caught short in Greece?
??? ????? ?? ?????????
There is a quite long list of possible phrases in a wide range of languages – some with accompanying soundfiles to aid pronunciation. And there are also phrases that are possibly not as useful, but nonetheless amusing such as ‘My hovercraft is full of eels’ – here in Mandarin Chinese ?????????? and Polish Mój poduszkowiec jest pe?en w?gorzy and ‘Stop the world, I want to get off!’ in perhaps Czech Zastavte sv?t, chci vystoupit! or Armenian ??????? ?????? ????????, ??? ?????? ????:

You can also access in a variety of languages, again some with soundfiles-
for example –

??? ????? ?? ???? ?????;
(Miá pápia ma piá pápia)
A duck but which duck). (GREEK)

Esel essen Nesseln nicht, Nesseln essen Esel nicht.
Donkeys don’t eat nettles, and nettles don’t eat donkeys. (GERMAN)

Mae Llewellyn y llyfrgellydd o Lanelli wedi llyfu llawer o lyfaint.
Llewellyn, the librarian from Llanelli, licked many toads. (WELSH)

3.Proverbs and quotations about languages.

Omniglot has collected together proverbs and quotations in various tongues on the subject of languages. The majority are quite profound –

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes

Una lengua natural es el archivo adonde han ido a parar las experiencias, saberes y creencias de una comunidad.
A natural language is the archive where the experiences, knowledge and beliefs of a community are stored.
– Fernando Lázaro Carreter (SPANISH)

Cenedl heb iaith, cenedl heb galon.
A nation without a language is a nation without a heart. (WELSH)

but there are others that are less ‘serious’ –

Chan fhiach cuirm gun a còmhradh.
A feast is no use without good talk. (GAELIC-SCOTLAND)

It’s no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase “As pretty as an airport” appear.
– Douglas Adams

??????????????????
(Ti?n bù pà, dì bù pà, zh? pà Gu?ngd?ng rén shu? P?t?nghuà)
I fear neither heaven nor earth, I only fear Cantonese speakers trying to speak Mandarin. (MANDARIN)

????????????????????
(Tìn m? gìng, deih m? gìng, jí gìng b?kfòng yàhn góng Gwóngdùngwá m?jeng)
I fear neither heaven nor earth, I only fear Mandarin speakers speaking Cantonese badly. (CANTONESE)

My particular favourites include

Any time you think some other language is strange, remember that yours is just as strange, you’re just used to it.

Kolik jazyk? znáš, tolikrát jsi ?lov?kem.
You live a new life f

or every new language you speak.
If you know only one language, you live only once. (Czech)

and this French saying that I hope will soon be seen as untrue –

Un homme qui parle trois langues est trilingue.
Un homme qui parle deux langues est bilingue.
Un homme qui ne parle qu’une langue est anglais.
A man who speaks three language is trilingual.
A man who speaks two languages is bilingual.
A man who speaks only one language is English.
– Claude Gagnière

Looking at all the above ‘favourites’ I can see the OMNIGLOT site as an excellent resource for expanding the vision of languages in an interesting and fun way.

Why not use it as a resource for European Day of Languages on 26th September?

You could use the artwork to inspire your pupils to create their own having looked at the section on various scripts and writing systems.

Or challenge pupils to learn tongue twister in another language – the sound files are great for that!

Or each class could attempt to learn a phrase in as many languages as possible – and other classes could guess the phrase – I think we’ll be doing this at WCPS!

Whatever you do, it’s well worth a look!