Native Languages: Worldblend Project

Today, I took a group of Year 6 pupils to participate in the Worldblend Project at Willesden Green Library. The project and exhibition is about the 130 different languages spoken in the borough of Brent.

Each child wrote a passage of their favourite book, then explained how they learn their native language and why it is important to keep speaking it.

The children thoroughly enjoyed the visit and felt very proud of their native languages, which is something that we promote a lot in our lessons (see how we celebrated Mother Languages Day last year).

International Mother Languages Day

This week at Sudbury Primary School we are celebrating the International Mother Languages Day. International Mother Language Day was proclaimed by the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in November 1999. The dissemination of mother tongues will serve not only to encourage linguistic diversity and multilingual education but also to develop fuller awareness of linguistic and cultural traditions throughout the world and to inspire solidarity based on understanding, tolerance and dialogue.

The pupils at Sudbury speak a lot of different languages at home and we want to appreciate and promote the use of these mother languages. 

The pupils of Year 5 have created presentations about their mother languages and culture, they have taught songs, poems, numbers etc. in the different languages to the class.

Liza´s poster about Kosovo

Reena and Deeya teaching a chant in Hindi and Gujarati

Jeshvin, who has won a lot of awards in Tamil language competitions, has presented his project about Tamil language. After his presentation, he taught the class a beautiful poem.

Tamil language by Jeshvin from NoeliaRG

Look at Lubcha's map of Bulgaria. Can you name the countries that border Bulgaria?

Nadine has shown some Egyptian money to the class. How are this notes similar and different that the pound notes?

Laura has told the class many interesting facts about Albania and Albanian language.

Albanian poem from Absentarg on Vimeo.

The pupils showed great interest in learning about each other's presentations and everybody felt appreciated and really proud of their heritage.

Update: Mme. Rivas talked about our Mother Languages project in the Network for Languages Conference in November 2015. We hope that other Language teachers were inspired and that they will celebrate IML day next year too!

Celebrating mother tongues from NoeliaRG