Jasmin, Tabitha, Alice and Alexis recently attended the Festival of Languages held at Portsmouth High School.
The morning started with a quiz which proved rather tricky: the Westbourne team were not sure how many living languages are estimated in the world, nor what is considered to be the first form of written language? Fortunately their other correct answers spelled the name of a European country so the team were able to work out the final two answers.
This was followed by a music quiz; the girls had to recognise the language in five different songs and they scored a magnificent 5/5. Listening to “Let it go” in Latin was very interesting!
The team then went on a treasure hunt around the school with all the clues in Spanish. They came back with flags which they had to match to the right countries. Another top score!
After a drink and chocolate cookie, they enjoyed a carousel of taster language lessons with some bilingual PHS pupils. They had a go at writing Chinese characters and Bengali script, they counted up to 10 in Japanese, said some tongue twisters in Russian, and expressed likes and dislikes in French and German.
The challenges of the morning opened the team's eyes to the diversity of languages, sounds and alphabets, all in a fun and enjoyable way.
My favourite activity was copying the Chinese and Bengali characters.
Alice
Jasmin added, "My favourite part of the morning was the carousel of languages."
