World Expo Day

St Bede’s Senior School recently hosted a ‘World Expo Day’ - a day of modern languages and culture.

Pupils from various prep schools, including St Bede’s Prep School, learnt words and phrases in French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian and Mandarin, as well as experiencing a little bit of each country’s culture as each language put on an activity. For example the children that chose Spanish learnt the names of parts of the body and also took part in an introduction to Salsa with the movements called out in Spanish.

The Italian group was learning adjectives and the history of Carnevale which lead to the pupils making their own Venetian masks to take home.

For Chinese the pupils were introduced to simple phrases in Mandarin, such as being able to say hello and introduce themselves. The children also greatly enjoyed taking part in the Chinese paper cutting activity.

Pupils choosing Russian learnt the alphabet, numbers and greetings. They also left knowing how to write their names in the Cyrillic alphabet.

In the German section of World Expo Day the children learnt descriptions relating to sport such as how to say: ‘I am a fast runner,’ which led onto the activity ‘Beat the goalie’, which saw the pupils take penalties at a St Bede’s Sixth Form German student in a German goalie shirt.

In the French group pupils were introduced to expressions such as ‘fast and slow’ which they then put into action on the spin bikes in a pretend Tour De France style race.

Each pupil was given a passport when they arrived at St Bede’s Sports Hall which had been transformed from a sports hall into a multi-cultural hall with flags and cultural items everywhere you looked. The passport was stamped by the member of staff in each language group after lesson and activity, giving the pupils the sense they had visited the country.

All activities and lessons were taken by St Bede’s Senior School language staff assisted by language students or native speaking international students.