Celebrating Languages and Diversity - WORLD LANGUAGES WEEK 2021
For the second year running, students and teachers celebrated World Language Week during the week 18-22 of October with various language activities, art, music, and quizzes on Kahoot.
WLW is for students and staff to celebrate the beauty and diversity of language as a native, 2nd, 3rd or even 4th language, and is part of our larger target to promote a culture within our School.
This year’s events started with an online survey designed to illustrate the spoken languages across the School, with particular emphasis given this year to the different idiomatic words and phrases used by the members of our community.
Following this survey, the Greek and Turkish Departments chose several idioms in Greek and Turkish, respectively. They asked the student in the Lower School to use any two of the given idioms in a paragraph they would write on a topic of their choice. Students were also asked to plan their own fictional story and use idiomatic phrases to describe actions and reactions of the characters in the plot. The majority of the students, particularly in Years 2 and 3, found these activities interesting and a very creative way indeed to practice their native language skills. Furthermore, The Greek Department asked the students to translate idioms or write down more idioms with the same or similar meaning. Both tasks enabled the students to identify the similarities between languages in terms of expression and to link these phrases to cultural characteristics.
With words and idioms from the survey as their starting point again, the Art Department designed 500 interlinked pieces which puzzled together to create an art installation, which will be installed on the ceilings of the ground floor corridors in Lloyds. Year 7 students created a small sample of the pieces Mikaella Hadjiyianni and Sotiris Neocleous and Year 6 student Orpheas Georgiou Kalavanas.
The Music Department focused on music as “the Universal Language of Mankind”, celebrated WLW through exciting performances during break time on Thursday the 21st and Friday the 22nd of October. All performances were also live-streamed.
Special thanks to students:
Ara Mahdessian (4W), Piano
Peiqi Song (2B), Piano
Akile Sogandji, Violin (4Y), Piano
Yuanhong Xie (6B), Violin
YouYou Tian (2W), Violin
Xinhui He (3Y)
Marios Papaioannou (1Y), Marimba
Andreas Ioannou (6W), Vocals, Guitar Piano
Aristotelis Christoforidis (6B), Saxophone
Ioannis Papazacharias (6G), Guitar, Bass
Panayiotis Hadjicostis Piano (6G), Guitar
Giorgos Nicolaou (6G), Drums
Finally, in the Middle and Upper School, students played a Kahoot during form tutor time on Monday and Tuesday, 18-19 October. The Kahoot consisted of more than 30 questions and provided students with a very entertaining way to test their knowledge about the different spoken languages and cultures across the world.
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