On Monday lunchtime, Miss White hosted LinguaScrabble in AL3. This was helped by our usual MFL scrabble club, with a few additional rules: all languages (except English) were permitted, so long as you could provide a translation and the word could be spelt using Romanised lettering, for example, using Pinyin for Mandarin and Romamji for Japanese. On the Wednesday, our wonderful English Department, along with some of our trusted Language Ambassadors, helped to judge our LinguaPoet competition. This competition was all about MFL literacy. We received many entries, in various languages, which included some poetry styles in their native language. For example, we received a Haiku written in Japanese. We wanted to do a competition like this to help our students show us their written language, not just how they speak it. It also allowed us to involve other departments, like the English department, and it was wonderful to see some of the time and care some students had put in, for example, some of the beautiful Arabic calligraphy in a couple of entries.

On the Thursday, along with our LinguaDress Day, we hosted our first LinguaCuisine celebration. Hosted in AL3, many of our students shared their traditional cultural dishes, all free of charge, as we wanted our students to widen their culinary and cultural tastes, be it through one or two dishes, or all of them. We had Hala bread and honey, a traditional Egyptian bean dip, and some middle eastern sweets. The atmosphere was electric as the students got to share just that little bit more of their culture with their peers, through the universal language of food and a smile. LinguaCuisine proved to be our most popular event, with almost all the food brought to school being eaten, and AL3 being so full that we had to begin to turn people away!

Along with these, the school hosted its traditional LinguaDress Day, with students across the school and Sixth Form taking their opportunity to express their culture within school, and many wore fun and interesting outfits, from flat caps to saris. LinguaDress Day helped us to raise over £500 for ‘Feed My City,’ a charity within our local community. 

These were just a few of the activities of LinguaFest, which help represent the fact that, at our school, being bilingual is our superpower.

By Tom Myring, 9E