European Day of Languages was celebrated at Manor House School this year with a special languages assembly, plus free gifts for all our girls. We started to make a collection of all the staff and pupils who spoke a European language at home as well as at school, and found that a significant number of languages from other parts of the world were also spoken.
Twenty five members of staff at Manor House speak other languages, including Afrikaans, Zulu, Swedish, Japanese, Hungarian, Spanish, Italian and German. We enjoyed hearing their different greetings in assembly.
An impressive number of Manor House School girls, approximately 40 of them, cope not only with the rigours of learning languages at school, but are also bilingual or nearly bilingual. Languages such as Danish, Portuguese, German, Gujerati, Urdu, Kosovan, Afrikaans, Japanese, Russian, Punjabi, Spanish, Arabic, Czech, French, Dutch and Turkish are spoken regularly in the homes of Manor House girls.
We heard from Mr Ayling, Mrs Diprose and Mrs Parish how languages have opened up so many opportunities in their lives, and Mrs Stephens explained how a knowledge of Latin and Greek can help enormously in not only the learning of all the languages which have their roots in Latin and Greek, but can also help with decoding puzzles, new language, the meanings of English words such as ‘somnambulist’, and even crosswords. All girls were given a languages pencil, a pen or a European passport with activities and stickers. We are looking forward to more activities which will celebrate all the languages which girls of all ages can speak at Manor House School.
