Languages - November 2024
“Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things.”
Flora Lewis
I begin my blog this year with a quote from Flora Lewis an influential American journalist of the 20th century. As the language’s faculty, we believe all language is valuable and we aim to ensure our students have the right words and approaches to view the world from multiple perspectives with understanding and compassion and we strive for this daily in our lessons and with all our students.
We have had another busy year utilising the opportunities to get our students out and experiencing language in as many different settings as we can and we will continue to do this as much as possible beyond our curriculum time.
Our first faculty trip was led by Mrs Bust in the Advent term who took a German GSCE group to the markets of Aachen and Cologne and then Mrs Guest took the Year 9 group in the Pentecost term to Germany to stay in Boppard with a visit to Koblenz where they experienced a gondola over the Rhine. Both excursions got to experience the lovely Lindt chocolate and had the opportunity to visit Cologne’s famous cathedral.
We have continued to review our curriculums and are proud to be offering German as an A Level language building upon the continued success of our KS3 and KS4 German lessons. The MFL lessons are making fantastic progress with the continued use of the Conti teaching method and the classrooms are a buzz of activity and excitement as students practise their target language. In English, we have continued to review our text offerings in KS3 to ensure we are looking at a wide range of current social issues but also using literature as window to explore different cultural periods so for example our year 8 students are taken back to the Japanese Sengoku period and the conflicts experienced. Whilst our year 9 students have been very much in the present and have enjoyed studying their first full verse narrative, exploring modern issues that we see spoken about on our daily news feeds and channels. We are continuing through the year to update our text choices exploring memoirs in both year 9 and 10 and we hope the students continue to share their positive experiences with their teachers.
As we did last year a number of theatre visits are planned and we will be taking year 8 to see &Juliet in 2025 and year 7 to see a performance of A Christmas Carol in December. The Germany trip is already on the go and Mrs Guest is finalising this for the summer term. Please keep alert to your ParentMails and emails as any other opportunities we find will be broadcast in this way.
Get in touch…
If you have any questions about the languages curriculum, wwww.chunt@nationalacademy.org.uk/ays for students and parents to get involved, or would like to ask about extra-curricular opportunities, please drop Miss Hunt, our faculty head, an email at: chunt@nationalacademy.org.uk