PGHS working in partnership with St Monica’s Catholic Primary School
24th March 2022
On Friday, 24th of February 2022, the MFL Department at PGHS went to visit St Monica’s School, one of our local partnership primary schools, for an afternoon of language discovery, fun and creativity. Mrs Larotonda, Mrs Parry-Garnaud and nine Y11 pupils spent time with Year 5, promoting languages as a whole and Spanish in particular.
The objective of the new partnership initiative is to give a taster day to Year 5 pupils in local state primary schools where the language is not taught. The aim of the session is to understand what the children know about other countries and languages, to nurture their curiosity, cultural sensitivity, empathy and tolerance.
The taster day involved class participation (answer and questions), quiz, dancing, singing, oral practice and miming!
Mrs Larotonda, our Argentinian Spanish Teacher, introduced the subject by asking True of False questions about Spanish facts. The pupils really enjoyed standing up for the True facts and sitting down for the False ones. We talked about famous Spanish people, places & monuments and obviously food & drink! The Y5 class realised that they already knew Spanish words like Paella, Churros, Pizza and guessed Hamburguesa and Limonada amongst the list provided.
The second part of the session was taken entirely by our Y11 Linguists who ran four different oral workshops. It was a real pleasure to see PGHS students delivering the language in such good spirits and creative ways. Lots of fun was had by all and the Y5 pupils learnt numbers 1-10, how to introduce themselves, and how to recognise and ask for specific food too. Our girls were perfect ambassadors for PGHS and as teachers we were very proud to see their expertise in the language and their determination to try something challenging. They all agreed that teaching seems easier than it is!
Language teaching and learning is an important part of our curriculum and we believe that sharing experiences broaden people’s view of the world around us.
