Foreign Languages News
European Day of Languages - Backpacking Around Asia
This year for European Day of Languages, and inspired by our whole-school book, The Midnight Panther, we decided to go on a backpacking trip around Asia. Some of this year's Language Ambassadors with links to Asia came up with the activities we did in each country we 'visited' and, in some cases, led the activities too.
We travelled around the school with our backpacks and, at each stop, the children had their passports stamped by passport control and did an activity in each country. We learned some Tamil dance moves in Sri Lanka, yoga in India, made a lucky eye in Turkey, learned two new traditional board games in Nepal and learned a new ball game in Brunei, called Sepak Takraw.
Many of the children looked fabulous in their traditional clothes and we had a fabulous day.
Language Ambassadors
Welcome to our new Language Ambassadors from Year 6. You can identify them by their blue 'Ambassador' badges, so if you need any help with anything language related, you know who to turn to.
We have got lots planned for the coming year, including assemblies, student-led language clubs and our 'Language of the Month'. We'll be starting off October with Arabic, spoken by around 420 million people around the world.
Merton and Kingston Primary Langauges Competition 2025 - "La Mode"
Well done to everyone who entered this year's languages competition which was on the theme of clothing, and huge congratulations to Elizabeth and Pavithira on winning special distinctions in the Best Poster category. Their posters were in Tamil and Ukrainian. You can see the winning entries below, along with some of the other amazing submissions.
Ukrainian Tamil
Albanian Amharic Gujarati Tamil Tamil
Duolingo for schools
Congratulations to all of our duolingo stars, who earned the highest amount of XP in their class over the course of the term. A special congratulations go to Violet in Sycamore class, who gained the most points in the whole of Malmesbury with 19,066 points. Well done to all of you!
European Day of Languages 2018-2024
Some highlights from the most recent celebrations of language and culture at Malmesbury, comprising of Caribbean Cruise Day, Home Languages Celebration Days, Fall of the Berlin Wall 30th Anniversary, Francophone Countries Day and Rainbow Languages Day.
Parlez-vous français?
In July, Year 5 were very excited to be speaking to their French pen-pals on a video-call. Our children prepared a few sentences in French and our pen-pals spoke in English. It was sometimes a bit difficult to understand, but it was nice to see each other. Find out more about our pen-pals on our 'International Links' page.
