We marked the European Day of Languages through various activities this year as well. Savremena Gimnazija is a school that can be proud of the fact that it has students from all parts of the world, so it was a special pleasure for us to celebrate with them everything that languages provide.
All the students, as well as language teachers, were involved in the celebration of the European Day of Languages. The main activity, which lasted the whole week, was the recording of an audiobook for children from the "Veljko Ramadanović" School for Visually Impaired Pupils. The students of Savremena Gimnazija read selected stories in various languages that are part of our school’s curriculum and all the material was compiled into an audiobook, which will be a gift to the students of the abovementioned school. Short stories were chosen that are interesting for students of their age. They are not covered in regular school lessons but they encourage students to think and discuss.
Acquiring new knowledge about the languages of the world through play
On 26 September, in their language classes, the students of Savremena Gimnazija, together with their teachers, gained new knowledge and learned interesting things about the languages of the world through various games, quizzes and internet applications. They tried to guess languages from audio recordings, pronounce tongue twisters in other languages, discover the longest words in the world, had a knowledge quiz about each language individually, and played various other language games via mobile apps.
Art and Design teachers joined us in celebrating this day, and they designed T-shirts with messages in different languages in their classes.
On that day, students of the entire school could write their messages to other students in a foreign language on a poster in the school hall.
The European Day of Languages celebrated with guests from Turkey
As in previous years, we celebrated the European Day of Languages with joy. This day was even more interesting because students and teachers from Turkey visited us as part of the "Ankara Provincial Directorate of National Education – Erasmus+ School Education Accreditation – Gazi Anadolu Lisesi Ankara" project, so the students of our school had the opportunity to chat with them in foreign languages, but also to design bookmarks together, which we then made and gave to the guests as souvenirs and as a memory of their visit to our school.
Michael Gregory joined one of our English classes
Finally, this week was marked by the visit of our colleague Michael Gregory, who, as a native English speaker, talked with the students about the topic they were covering in class at the time as part of the Cambridge programme – travel. In this way, the students got the opportunity to check their language skills, but also what and how much they can understand when communicating with a person whose mother tongue is English.
An unforgettable experience – new aspects of language
We believe that through these numerous activities the students learned about some new aspects of the language, had fun, but also understood the importance of learning foreign languages and got the motivation to use both native and foreign languages correctly and improve their current language knowledge.
