Ideas to Celebrate Languages and Cultures

Great for National Foreign Language week (generally a week in March) or any time

• Hand out the MLA “Knowing Other Languages Brings Opportunities” brochure (or another brochure that you know of) and have students discuss the key points to share with their parents.
• Give students ribbons/flags for the language they are studying.
• Hold a department wide “Talent Show” where students perform skits, fashion shows, sing, dance and basically show off all of their skills
• Have a “Language Bowl”. Teams of teachers and students compete against each other answering questions about languages and cultures.
• On the announcements play world music.
• Hold a “Mystery Language Contest” using foreign exchange students or students from your school. Each day have a different language spoken and the class that gets the most correct guesses wins a donut party. Sneak in clever languages like Old English, Pig Latin and English from different countries.
• Give a daily language fact that alerts students to the importance of learning languages.
• Have guest speakers who use language in their daily jobs come to the school to discuss the importance of knowing other languages.
• Hold a poetry reading contest.
• Have a pronunciation contest with native speakers being the judges. Prizes could be CDs in the language.
• Have a school wide Internet “scavenger hunt” in which teachers and students compete to find information about different languages.
• Put up posters with quotes and facts about languages.
• Hold an “International Say What Karaoke Contest” in which students lip sync to world music.
• Host International Lunches in which different language clubs host a culture specific lunch.
• Put up flags of different countries throughout the campus.
• Have a “Mystery Country Contest” where students are given clues about a country and have to identify the country and locate it on a world map.
• Ideas for National Foreign Language Week activities: http://www.jc.edu/users/stevenso/FLAND/flwk.html