International themed outreach event for local Primary school children – Monday 24 June 2025
We started the week welcoming 84 primary school children from Years 5 and 6 in local primary schools to RGS Dodderhill for a morning of internationally themed education. This work was led by our GCSE Modern Foreign Language students in Year Ten, under the guidance of Anaya (the Language Ambassador on the student leadership team) and Mrs Di Risio. The aim of the day is to encourage curiosity and engagement in Languages, Art and Computer Science – particularly amongst young girls. This is particularly important in light of the decline of uptake in some languages at GCSE level nationally.
We began the day with a special welcome breakfast of churros, croissants and fruit juice. After that, we offered a carousel of activities including learning about clothes in French and giving opinions about what to wear on holiday, animals in Spanish, creating a gorgeous Spanish printed tile based on oranges and lemons in an Art workshop, and finally a Computer Science lesson. By using Google Earth’s interactive 3D simulation, they located three different countries and researched two key facts about each to develop their digital research and geographical understanding. They then selected one country’s flag and learned how to represent it as a bitmap image, using numerical values to store and recreate the colour of each pixel, introducing them to the fundamentals of digital image representation and data encoding.
The value of these events is evident in the way that the RGS Dodderhill students and Language Ambassadors shared their linguistic skills and cultural awareness with the younger children from our local area. They spoke in French and Spanish and led games within the lessons. They had also prepared some of the resources for the lessons, like a matching game in Spanish about animals. This is a voluntary activity on their part, but they are very enthusiastic to join in and act as role models for language learning! It reaches far beyond our family of schools to children in our local area – some of whom had their first Spanish lesson with us! What an honour!
Other students in Year Ten supported the Art and Computer Science workshops as a way of developing their leadership portfolios. This week’s event builds on three years of Language Outreach events to a range of Primary schools in our local area.
