Welcome to IST Elementary Additional Languages

As the Foreign or Additional Languages team, we would like to welcome you to our blog. We look forward to a productive and creative language learning experience for your child. Here you will find what’s happening in our Additional Language classrooms, special announcements, links to valuable language resources, and much more.

IST World Languages Week!

Next week is World Languages Week at IST! It is a fantastic opportunity for students to celebrate their home language and learn about other languages and cultures.

During the week, we will have lots of fun and exciting activities happening:

- you will hear some astonishing facts and interesting statistics about languages
- you’ll learn to say hello in 60 different languages
- you can watch performances of songs and dances in different languages,
- you can hear stories in different languages
- you can write your favourite foreign language word on our grafitti word wall
- you can proudly wear a badge that boasts all the different languages you can speak or are learning
- you can buy food at the Kiswahili food sale on Wednesday, the Spanish food sale on Thursday and the French food sale on Friday!

We invite parents to come in and share stories, games, songs or other cultural insights from their home language – please see your class teacher for more details.

Maintaining your mother tongue…

Parents often wonder whether they should maintain development of their children’s native language, doubting whether it will interfere with what they’re learning at school and questioning if it will in fact hinder their progress in an English-medium school such as IST. Similarly, we sometimes wonder about the benefits of learning another language and are curious as to whether it serves any meaningful purpose. Here’s an interesting and rather convincing article I read in the NY Times today about Why Bilinguals are Smarter…

Enjoy!

Delicieux…

As a culmination of our recent unit on food and drink, Grade 5 students chose to display their learning in a variety of ways for their final assessment piece. Some chose to do a skit in a restaurant, some designed their own French cafe with an authentic menu, others did word lists, and some demonstrated a recipe or two that they had learnt… Here’s a little taster that you might like to try at home

Merci Jemma!

Recette pour mousse au chocolat

View more PowerPoint from smt786

Parents – some food for thought!

Here’s something that parents may find interesting – an ongoing debate about whether it really is useful in today’s world to learn more than one language or whether English’s emergence as a global language will make the investment in learning other languages less worthwhile. I would love to hear your views and comments on this!

Learning other languages – what’s the point?

Il fait chaud…

Wondering what the weather is like in different regions of Tanzania today? Well wonder no more, because Grade 4 students have been busy learning about the weather and have managed to put together some great forecasts… in French!

La meteo – Meki from Soukeina Tharoo on Vimeo.

La meteo from Soukeina Tharoo on Vimeo.

La meteo – Vansh from Soukeina Tharoo on Vimeo.

Bof dit…

Here’s a game we love to play in French class. It’s called ‘Bof dit…’ and it involves the use of our class puppet – un petit dragon qui s’appelle Bof. Bof says an action, for example ‘levez les bras’, and everybody follows the command and raises their arms. However, when the command is not preceded by ‘Bof dit…’ you mustn’t do the action or else you’ll be out!

Can you guess what the equivalent game in English is called?

Freaky French phantoms…

Grade 3 have been learning about the body, identifying parts of the body and describing physical features such as eyes and hair. Just in time for Halloween, we drew our own scary French phantoms with weird body parts. We gave them names and then presented them to the class, describing each one using the French phrases that we’ve learnt. Another highlight of this unit was the coffin of body parts that Miss Soukeina shared with us – it was great fun to pass around the different body parts and learn their names in French. Spooky stuff!

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Whole World In Our Hands

Skype In The Classroom – Global Projects!

Recently one of our beloved Kiswahili teachers, Mr. Evans Haule worked with Mr. Mikey McKillip, our ICT Coordinator, and Mr. Mike Grother, UK Music Teacher, to help coordinate a musical number “He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands” with a group of school children in the UK.

Mr. Grother contacted various teacher/educators from around the world to help him teach his group of children to sing this song in different languages. Mr. McKillip arranged for Mr. Haule to teach the children in the UK how to translate and sing a portion of this song in Kiswahili. Mr. Haule, from his computer, watched and listened to the UK students practice singing in Kiswahili, giving them advice on pronunciation. The students visited with Mr. Haule and other teachers from around the world using Skype as a way to learn and communicate.

Read more about this project from UK Music Educator Mike Grother’s Blog.

Chezesha mwili wako! Move your body!

KG classes have been learning about body parts in Kiswahili and have been making sentences using different parts of the body. They learnt the song ‘Head, shoulders, knees and toes’ in Kiswahili and played some fun and entertaining vocabulary games. They also enjoyed acting out the story ‘Hadithi ya Katope’ – the boy made out of mud who went out to play, got stuck in the rain and found that his body parts dissolved one by one!

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Hola amigos! In the Spanish classroom, we started talking about feelings and how to express them using the verb “estar”.

 

Can you guess what feelings are shown in the pictures? The students are great actors, so I’m sure you will guess right.

 

Buena suerte y hasta pronto amigos…