During LOTE Week, held 10-14 August, as a College we celebrated our interest in other cultures and languages around the world. Languages Faculty Learning Leader Ms Maybelle Pangilinan and I worked together to create a LOTE Club on Google Classroom, which will continue. Here students can access various resources under the categories of cooking, including gnocchi (pictured) and tiramisu, songs, videos, origami (I am pictured above with my origami turtle) and crafts, gaming (my friends and I playing Briscola and Scopa online are pictured below), OzCLO and Your Future in LOTE.
We want to provide our students alternative ways to strengthen their language skills. Our main objective is to broaden their understanding of other countries, beyond the literal language.
Although we were not able to take on a face-to-face approach to LOTE Week this year, it has no doubt been a success. We have many students in our club who can easily access our activities. Furthermore, we will be able to use this page as a medium to contact all of our language enthusiasts. I hope this club will spark more and more participation and curiosity of languages and cultures in future years.
In the LOTE Club, students were set some challenges to do at home, including making the 2009 Guinness World Record paper plane with an Italian tutorial. Students could also do their own tik tok-style dance video using the same actions and song Wash Your Hands from a popular Japanese boy band.
We hope to add more topics to the LOTE Club Classroom page each month, including amusing Japanese videos, well-known Japanese characters, virtual tours of art museums in Italy and highlights of past Study Tours to Italy and Japan.
Below LOTE Club member Denisse Lopez Garza (Year 8 Blue) writes about her LOTE Week experience:
I loved all the activities in the LOTE Club Classroom and attempted to do as many as I could and tried to get my family involved too. I tried to do some origami and the plane challenge was fun. I tried my best to do Radio Calisthenics. We re-watched all of my favourite childhood Studio Ghibli movies, which I still enjoy, and I watched some Italian movies too. I looked at OzCLO problems for a while. I was interested in AUSLAN and tried to memorise some of it. My older sister (Marisa) has her mind set on being a translator and has started to learn languages online. She told me how to start learning languages and which ones are better to learn after I asked which were easiest. All the extra resources and information was really fascinating. This was a great experience and kept me busy and happy throughout the week because I tried so many new things.
