East of England

Wow, they were fantastic!!!

On Tuesday 13th December a record number of students, together with their families and teachers descended on Routes into Languages East, in our new home at Cambridge University.

The Mother Tongue Other Tongue project (originally devised by staff at the Faculty of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Manchester Metropolitan University and Routes into Languages North West. Piloted in 2012, it has been adopted as a Laureate Education Project and shared with regions across the country) has grown and grown each year. This year of the hundreds of entries submitted to teachers, 64 school winners  (Year 7 - Year 12) from 13 schools were submitted to Routes into Languages East for the final judging. All the shortlisted poems were included in the printed Anthology, which each student was given as a prize (more copies are available here at £5 per copy - email ss2431@cam.ac.uk to request a copy).

The competition comprises 2 categories:

• Mother Tongue – pupils whose first language is not English, or who speak another language at home, are encouraged to submit a poem or song in their Mother Tongue. This can be an original or a ‘remembered’ piece.
  It can be written in any language, except English. Entries will be judged on a short paragraph in which pupils will explain the piece and its significance to them.

• Other Tongue – pupils learning another language in school are encouraged to get creative with their Other Tongue and submit an original poem for the competition. 

There was a huge wealth of wonderful poetry submitted this year and our panel of judges (consisting of language and poetry experts) often found it very difficult to select the winners. So difficult, in fact, that the original plan of a winner per key stage was abandoned and winners and highly commended prizes were awarded for each year group submitted:

1. MOTHER TONGUE

2. OTHER TONGUE

The 120 students, teachers and parents seemed to really enjoy visiting the the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at Cambridge University where the Celebration Event was held in the Little Hall lecture theatre. The programme included the awarding of prizes, with some poets performing their poems, as well as an amazing Poetry Slam, led by Slam Poetry UK Champion, Joelle Taylor (click on her name for a link to her website or here to see her performing her powerful poem, 'Last Poet Standing', one of the poems she performed at the Celebration Event), featuring young poets from a group of 14 Voyager Academy students from Peterborough, who had taken part in a workshop with Joelle on Language & Identity at the University in the afternoon. This was Joelle's second time headlining for Routes into Languages East and once again the students absolutely loved her!

The Celebration Event was great fun - well done to all the poets and their teachers!

Well done to the cup and shield winners of the Routes into Languages Spelling Bee National Final held at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge on Friday 1st July!

Huge congratulations to them as well as all the winning regional finalists who attended the national final and all their teachers! They were the final 103 competitors out of the nearly 75,860 who started the competition!!!

It was a very exciting afternoon – a little of which can be seen on Anglia TV by clicking here 

Huge thanks to our generous sponsors the European Commission for providing the trophies and the refreshments

The winning school in each language will also receive a KS3 licence for 2016/7 from our other generous sponsors Vocab Express.

Wednesday afternoon saw 50 Year 8 pupils from seven Peterborough schools, The Voyager Academy, Ormiston Bushfield Academy, Hampton College, Jack Hunt School,  Ormiston Bushfield Academy, The King’s School and Ken Stimpson Community School fight it out on Wednesday in the final of the Have Your Say competition in the presence of the Deputy Mayor and Mayoress. All the students were the winners of their school competitions  for which they had learnt and performed dialogues in French, Spanish, German and Urdu.

The final competition was hosted by Thomas Deacon Academy, organised by teacher, Anke de Munster, with help from her impressive band of sixth form Language Leaders and sponsored by Routes into Languages East at Anglia Ruskin University.

The instigator of the competition, Rachel Hawkes of  The Voyager Academy and The Cam Academy Trust said “ Speaking is, without a doubt, the most important skill in language learning, but also one which causes the most anxiety.  It is exciting to see so many students enjoying speaking languages and performing at such a high level in front of an audience. ”

The pupils really seemed to enjoy the afternoon, and the standard was extremely high, even higher than last year’s inaugural competition.  The winners’ trophy went to Aleksandra Waligora  and Joanna Zajac of The Voyager Academy for a lively Spanish dialogue, fluently delivered with excellent Spanish pronunciation and great expression.

The other top ten winners were:

Well done to all 50 competitors (and their teachers!) who  were all winners to  get this far and represent their schools.

Sarah Schechter, Project Manager, Routes into Languages East