Last week our fantastic Languages department had an exciting and action-packed week celebrating Languages Week. The week was selected to tie in with European Day of Languages but the Fettes Language department took it one step further and celebrated all languages and cultures in our community and beyond.

Highlights of the week included:

The Modern Languages Bake-off
Well done to our winners Elliott M, Clara H, Lily W and Iona C who won based on our categories of taste, creativity and most eye-catching bakes. A special mention must go to all of those who took part. We enjoyed a moon cake, cupcakes, biscuits and a huge array of talent was displayed.

Classroom Activities 
Within our classes we explored languages spoken all around the world, completed some translation using the Anthea Bell translation resources, played Just Dance in a range of languages and lots more; not to mention the makeover in the Languages corridor. Ms Montgomery took the opportunity to teach some sign language and Mr Coppola explored accent, identity and dialect.

Language Taster Session
Teachers were kept on their toes in our Language Taster Sessions in which students offered short sessions in some of the languages spoken in our community. We had Bangla (Unaiza C), Telugi (Sirisha S) Kiswahili (Tili M), Cantonese (Zamara and Xavax C), Russian (Kira V) and Italian (Marco D). The Head, Mrs Harrison dropped in to try her hand at Italian in the session taught by Matteo C. A huge thanks to all of our volunteers and also to Mr Macklon for running a Dutch session too.

Talk presented by Thomas Chaurin
We finished off the week with a talk from Thomas Chaurin, who is the director the Languages for All at the University of Edinburgh. He discussed the importance of learning languages at school and beyond. We had a full turnout and it was great to see a range of students from those heading to University next year to those linguists who have just entered the Senior School.

"It has been a busy week but we can’t wait to do it again next year. Thank you to the Modern Languages team and all the students who took part – we couldn’t have celebrated it in quite the same way without you."

S Gausinet Serrano (she/her)
Joint Head of Modern Foreign Languages & Head of Spanish