On Friday June 12th, nine Year 10 students (Madeleine Horst, Aisling Stewart, Rebecca Underwood, Tom Gordon, Will Bosustow, Chloe Philo, India Falconer and Rosalind Thompson) from Crofton School spent the day at St. Vincent College, participating in a range of interesting workshops. The focus of the day was languages; French, Spanish and German. We met lots of other students from Bridgemary School, Portchester School, Bayhouse School and Mayville High School and worked together with them in groups. In the French workshop, we learned how to direct someone in French and also did some gym exercises! In the other workshops, we took part in quizzes and learned lots of new things about countries in Europe.

Then there was lunch. St. Vincent College kindly provided us with lunch vouchers so we could choose whatever we wanted for free! One student even described the experience of eating in the canteen as ‘blingin’. After lunch we got back into our groups to make presentations. The presentations had to be discussing the thought-provoking question, “Why is it important to learn other languages when most people in other countries speak English?” They could be in any form: from posters and PowerPoint slideshows to role-play and modern dance! The group I was in (Group 3) chose the poster approach, along with an entertaining ‘game show’ role- play which featured Will as its host.

After the presentations, we took a short break while the judges (language specialists from the college) decided which group was the winner. When we got back, we were very surprised and pleased to find out that Group Three had won! We were given prizes and certificates to take back to school with us.

All in all, it was a very successful day. Thank you to the staff at St. Vincent College, as well as Mrs. Hlavaty and Mr. Neumann for taking us. When asked to describe her day in one word, Aisling yelled, “Prima!”

Madeleine Horst (10H)

Nine students from Crofton School took part in a stimulating day at St. Vincent College on Friday 12th June. We were doing various workshops on the topic of “Why is it important to learn another language, when most people all around the world speak English?” We were working with people from other schools and the students that went from crofton were joined by Mrs. Hlavaty and Mr. Neumann.

We arrived at 10:15am, which was a bit later than most of the other schools! We were put into groups with people from the other schools so that we could interact with them and make new friends. There were workshops in different languages because the students from different schools had all been leaning a variety of languages. The first workshop that I took part in was the German workshop. In this, we had to do a quiz on Germany to find out what we knew about it.

Then, we took part in a Spanish workshop which was interesting because I don’t learn Spanish and therefore I did not know much about Spanish culture. The last workshop that our group did before lunch, was a quiz about different cultures and our team came second.

Lunch was provided by the college, who gave us a voucher with which to purchase our food. In the afternoon we had to make a presentation about the importance of learning a language and some of the role-plays were quite funny. We had to perform them in front of the rest of the groups and there were prizes for the best group.

I enjoyed this day because we learned to appreciate other languages and cultures and I also got to meet one of my friends from another school who I had not been in touch with for years. It was a very successful day as we got to learn about the importance of languages and interact with people from other schools. As one student said “It was an interesting day and I learned a lot about other cultures in Europe”.

Aisling Stewart (10W)