The Gordon Schools

Languages Work! 2006

Wednesday 1st November 2006 saw the fifth annual Languages Work! event at The Gordon Schools.

For this year's event we decided to take a risk. We wanted our S4's to do all the work, to do the thinking for themselves. Via an embarrassing piece of ham theatre, a video presentation and an information booklet the participants were provided with masses of information regarding the usefulness and necessity of learning a foreign language. The pupils were then challenged to come up with a presentation which promoted the study of languages. Having previously split the cohort into various specialisations there were groups working on musical presentations, drama pieces, comic strips, leaflets and powerpoint shows.

They had 15-20 minutes before the morning break to plan what they would do and the double period before lucnh to put it all together. The post lunch period was given over to the presentation and judging of the pupils projects.

If the truth be known the 20 minutes before break was quite fraught and we wondered just what we had let ourselves in for during the rest of the day. Once again the pupils did not let us down. In fact they really rose to the challenge and the time before lunch was a real buzz of activity...I think thats a way of saying very noisy. There were superhero comic strips, chav drama and mini rock operas.

For the Judging we invited Catriona Oates from Scottish Cilt, Anne Moncur, Aberdeenshire Languages Development Officer and Andrew Travis, Acting Rector The Gordon Schools. There were prizes for winners in each category (Music, Art & Drama) and an overall winner was chosen.

The overall winner and winner of the music category was a song entitled "Hopefully" written by a group of ...boys!!!! The drama category was won by a piece of chav theatre, which can be seen on the film whilst a leaflet entitled "Languages. The gateway to opportunity" won the art section.

On the whole it must be said that the day was a roaring success. You could count on the fingers of one hand those students not really taking part. (Not bad out of 150+). One of the really pleasing outcomes of the day was the hugely postive response from the boys. Probably the fact that they were invilved in something practical and creative got them going.

Please download, listen to, watch and read the records of the proceedings. If we must tick boxes Languages Work 2006 ticked every possible with regards to A Curriculum for Excellence.

The first down load are the song lyrics, the second is a film record of the day and the third is a podcast record. the backing music is a piece speciallyrecorded and written by a former school captain for our award winning Languages Work! project in 2004

Download hopefully_song.doc

Download the_gordon_schools_languages_work_2006.mov

Download languages_work_2006.mp3

Languages Work!

Time is fast approaching for our annual Langauges Work seminar. This time it's the turn of the S4's to reflect on the study of languages and it's place in society.
We won a CiLT award for this in 2004 which was presented by Sir Trevor MacDonald down in London. As you can imagine it gets harder each year to think of a new focus, although last year was nice because we did it for the P7's in our feeder primaries. The highlight of this was a new language challenge where students were challenged to "learn" a new language in 30 minutes. Not only were French, German and Spanish on offer, but we had some of our own pupils teaching Turkish, Welsh and Dutch we even had one group learning Boulou, a language from Cameroon (thanks to my wife). All in all it went down very well.

Now for this year. We have been racking our brains for a focus but we think we have found, with no small help from our first minister Mr McConell (former Maths teacher). This is the plan. Via a carefully scripted debate we will present all the usual rubbish spouted as reasons for not learning a language in school, making sure these ideas are presented totally without subtlety. We will then challenge the students to counter these with their own pro arguments in as creative a manner as possible...podcast, video, drama, song etc.

So dear blog readers, any thoughts, ideas etc.