Page Title

About our penpals	2
Le rap français	2
All directions: languages and work days	2
Working with our community	3
Festival of Languages and Cultures	3
Work experience in Segovia	3
Peru Expedition 20062	4

Text Box: The active volcano on the Indian Ocean island of La Réunion, which is a French overseas département where we have a link with a secondary school, is at the heart of an innovative project helping year 9 geography students to learn about volcanoes… in French! Advanced Skills Teacher Andrea Simpson and Subject Leader for Geography Matthew Morris have created a unit of work which integrates a topic from the geography curriculum with active language learning,

Text Box: and the response from the pilot year 9 group has been extremely positive. They presented their work at the 2006 Language Colleges Conference, and recently welcomed languages and geography teachers from around the North East to a demonstration lesson and presentation of the resources they have created. More materials, and more dissemination of this work, will follow next year.

Text Box: In October 2005 International Co-ordinator Fred Dove represented St. Aidan’s at a national ceremony to receive the prestigious British Council International School Award, for outstanding development of the international dimension in the curriculum. This was the culmination of over a year’s work, auditing existing international activities, writing a development plan for the following year, then producing a portfolio of evidence and evaluation of all the completed work. The resulting tome is testimony to the huge amount of international work going on across a wide range of departments, in our wider community work, and through the Chaplaincy programme. It is impossible here to comment on all the activities which helped us to achieve the award, which included study visits and expeditions, cross-curricular projects, international links with several countries, and international professional development for staff. Students and staff traveled to France, Madagascar, Spain, Hungary, Tanzania and New York, and explored aspects of the art, DT and ICT curriculum. In school, projects combined French with rap music, and Spanish with music and DT to make Catalan “giants” and explore the music of the region; speakers highlighted issues of fair trade, child poverty and international debt, and our Amnesty group saw our

Text Box: adopted prisoner released. Existing and new links with schools in France, Spain and Sierra Leone formed part of several projects, and planned giving and fundraising generated several thousand pounds for causes such as our “Float a boat” appeal for fishing communities impoverished by the tsunami, CAFOD World Gifts and a new school library for St. Joseph’s School, Blama. Many of these activities and projects are ongoing, and new ones are developing all the time. Four years ago our Language College mission statement included a commitment to making our school visibly and explicitly international in outlook, and encouraging pupils’ awareness that citizenship is local, national and global; the aim is becoming a reality.