Modern Foreign Languages Outreach and Partnerships Workshop
RGS Worcester held a Modern Foreign Languages Outreach morning with 120 primary school pupils from Oldbury Park, Honeywell Primary and RGS Springfield.
The event aimed to celebrate modern foreign languages and broader international cultural understanding.
Partner pupils had the chance to experience three language lessons - French, German and Spanish.
In addition to the language lessons, there were activities for pupils to participate in, including a French card game, German 'What am I? game, and in Spanish there was a dice game to construct sentences.
To further immerse themselves in the culture pupils enjoyed typical food from each country with churros from Spain, pretzels from Germany and croissants from France.
Aims
The aims of these partnerships is to develop an interest and excitement for learning foreign languages and experiencing new cultures. Whilst French is often studied in primary school, we are able to further develop and support our partners' language curriculum with two additional languages of German and Spanish.
The Modern Foreign Language (MFL) Outreach morning is led by our older pupils, enabling them to be involved in local community work.
For the workshop to be successful our teachers need to be available to facilitate these sessions.
Whilst visiting pupils clearly benefit from the sessions, visiting teachers report that these pupils will be able to share their new learnings with their fellow pupils back in their own settings.
Background
Modern Foreign Language Outreach sessions have been successfully run for a number of years before the Pandemic.
Returning to Outreach and Partnerships events post Pandemic this was a key highlight in our Outreach and Partnerships calendar.
The MFL staff were keen to re-establish connections with partner schools.
Resources
Key resources were teachers and our Year Ten pupils. The teachers organised the interactive languages and culture based activities which were then run and led by our Year Ten pupils.
The MFL workshop was held within six classrooms at our School.
Classrooms were set up as different language centres.
In addition snacks were provided for the partner school pupils.
Impact
The anticipated outcome is to inspire and share a love of new languages and cultures.
“Thank you again for inviting us. Our children really enjoyed all of the sessions and came away with a newfound enjoyment of learning languages! Please pass on our thanks to the Language department and all of your students.”
Pupil Involvement
The Modern Foreign Language Outreach session was led by pupils in Year Ten.
The pupils explain and demonstrate the language based games to the Primary school partner pupils, assisting them where needed and engaging with the younger pupils. They also led the language lessons.
Frequency
The Modern Foreign Language Outreach is a popular annual event enjoyed by our partner schools as well as our teachers and pupils.