St Margaret's RC Primary School

We at St. Margaret’s decided to introduce a Languages Week into our yearly calendar, to educate both the children and teachers on the benefits of learning languages and to eradicate some of the fears associated with it.

Many teachers are reluctant to embrace new languages within the classroom because they are worried about their own subject knowledge and this is understandable. To alleviate these fears, we created an ethos where we would endeavour to learn languages together, with the teachers and pupils acquiring knowledge as we moved along.

Each class within the school chose a language that enthused the pupils and we planned to link languages with the Geography and culture of a specified country. The results were fantastic and the parental input was a great help. We have so many bilingual parents that it would be foolish not to use this resource which is on our doorstep. Parents helped us by teaching both Hungarian and Lithuanian to the children and all the evidence can be found in our special vlog, created specifically for languages week.

Exploring the cultural aspects of our chosen countries allowed us to sample the music, food, art and traditions of places many of the children had never heard of. This fully immersed the children in the project and the languages were an integral part of our learning. The results are a great example of Curriculum for Excellence in full flow as we have managed to cover a huge amount of Experiences and Outcomes from a variety of subjects.

View the special vlog created for our Languages Week.