Language Friendly School
By Margit Tera
Optimist International School has taken its first steps towards becoming a member of Language Friendly Schools.What is a Language Friendly School?
A Language Friendly School is a school where all languages spoken by the pupils are welcomed and valued. By allowing students’ home languages in school, multilingual students get the chance to strengthen their cognitive and social skills.
We’ve had our first meeting with other joining schools and the leaders of Language Friendly Schools. The first step on our journey is to assess and monitor how different languages are used in our classrooms and how home languages can be supported at school.
We are already a very language friendly team, with the amount of languages we speak and the nationalities we have amongst our team, including Swedish, Estonian, Australian, Spanish, Canadian, American, Greek, Dutch, New Zealand, English, Irish, South African and Polish.
We hope to have our next meeting in May after which the school, together with our staff, students, parents and the community, will start developing our own language plan and setting up a time frame to implement it.
If you would like to know more about Language Friendly School, please visit their website: https://languagefriendlyschool.org/
Exciting times ahead..!