On Wednesday 22nd March, a handful of pupils from U4 to U5 were invited to the regional finals of the Mother Tongue Other Tongue Poetry Competition at Cambridge University, having successfully been nominated as finalists. Pupils had to write a poem either in their mother tongue or in a language they are learning.
One of Norwich School's winners, Ava Yassin, kindly gave us this account of the event:
"The Mother Tongue Other Tongue Poetry Competition was hosted at the beautiful Murray Edwards College at Cambridge University with many different secondary level schools attending. We were welcomed with refreshments while we waited for the event to begin and were shown into a gallery of artwork while we waited.
We were swiftly shown into a small lecture hall where we listened to a talk about the importance of learning a language. We talked about the pros of being bilingual or multilingual and even played a fun and interactive game where we had to guess what the Japanese word for cucumber was with the pupils having to use logic to solve this problem! We also looked at expressions that were untranslatable into other languages such as 'Kummerspeck' in German, which means: excess weight gained from emotional overeating (literally: grief bacon) which was very funny and enjoyable.
The Mother Tongue winners were then announced and given the opportunity to perform their poems to the audience. We listened to poems, songs and stories in beautiful home languages. Winners from Norwich School in this category were: Kyriel Fynn and Mohid Sandhu. This was followed by winners from the Other Tongue category with many poems performed in multiple different languages such as French, Spanish and German. Winners from Norwich School were Aaron Abu, Kyriel Fynn, Georgia Hodgson, Sophia Wigglesworth and myself. All of the other shortlisted students then received a certificate and were given the opportunity to read their piece out. Overall, it was a very educational day and was enjoyed by everyone in attendance."
