Celebrating our home languages

At OIS, International Mothers Language Day provides a unique opportunity to celebrate the diversity of languages and dialects spoken by all our students, staff and families, and to promote language learning and multicultural understanding. By recognising and celebrating the heritage of our students and staff, we can create a more inclusive and welcoming learning environment for all.

The Language Parade

This year, our multilingual learning team decided to organise a language parade.  And you might wonder what that entailed. At 1.45pm the children all went outside into the school playground where they met in the different language groups – we had 20 language groups, which is just amazing! They then paraded all together through the school to the allocated rooms where different activities were taking place.

We saw reading groups happening in Telegu, Hindi, Malayalam, English, Romanian, Bengali and Portuguese, songs in Tamil and Kannada, chants in Marathi, laughter yoga and dance in Hindi, games in Russian, Turkish, Spanish, Arabic, Ukrainian and German, craft sessions in Urdu and Polish and calligraphy lessons in Japanese.

It was amazing to hear and see the many different languages from across the corridors. There was lots of laughter and excitement and you could see the proud faces of the children when talking their mother language and learning and hearing the languages of their peers. Language learning is so important to us and one of the reasons we are a certified Language Friendly School.

We want to thank our amazing multilingual learning team for organising this fabulous event and all the parents and staff involved for their time and effort in making this year’s International Mother Language Day such a success. It is great to see the whole OIS community come together to celebrate the importance of our mother languages.