Rights Respecting School: World Week

Hello, everyone.

As you all know, this week is World Week at St. Vincent’s when we come together to celebrate the rich diversity of languages, countries and cultures of our St Vincent’s family.

As a Rights Respecting School we use every opportunity to explore the United Nations Convention for the Rights of the Child. We want to ensure that every adult and every child knows and understands the rights and also understand the need to respect the rights of others. Here is an overview of all of the Rights of the Child: UNRC Children’s rights

During world week, we focus particularly on Article 30: “Children have the right to use their own language, culture and religion – even if these are not shared by most people in the country where they live.”

This week, in the topic sessions we have been taking part in a variety of special World Week activities to learn more about this right and the importance of respecting this right. We have also been learning special World Week songs in the weekly Singing sessions with Mr Rees. Lots of you have sent me photos of you celebrating your country/ies ready for the World Week film tomorrow.

Did you know that there are over 7,000 languages spoken in the world but that half of the world speak one of only 23 languages as their first language? In England, English is the first language for over 90% of people but the other  20 most spoken languages are; Polish, Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Arabic, French, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, Welsh, Tamil, Turkish, Italian, Somali, Lithuanian, German, Persian, Philippine languages (Tagalog and Cebuano) and Romanian.

Today, we would love to celebrate the range of languages spoken within our school family. We all speak English at school as our shared language but there are so many other languages that we speak and hear at home. 

Please leave a comment to tell us about the languages that are spoken in your family and also how to say ‘Hello’ so that we can learn more about each other and also how to greet each other in lots of different languages.  

I am looking forward to hearing from you all.

Love from Miss Siswick

Here are some more activities that you could try at home to explore Article 30:

• Watch ‘If the World were a Village of 100 People ’ to find out more about people and languages around the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtYjUv2x65g

• Keep a food and drink diary for the week. What cultures do your food and drink come from? Which are your favourites?

• Design a menu for your household for the week that involves food from different cultures. Prepare one or two of the meals for the people you live with.

• Do you know any  dances or songs from other cultures? Research these safely online or ask a friend or grown up to teach you and practise the steps/words.

• Find 10 characters from your favourite books. Do they come from a range of cultures or are they all just like you?

• Read books by lots of different kinds of writers from all around the world.

• Can you find out how to say ‘”Hello, how are you?”’ in 5 different languages?