News from the School
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National Finals - Routes into Languages Translation Bee
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The Routes into Languages Translation Bee is a competition allowing students in Year 8
and 9 to build on the work they did in Year 7 with the National Spelling Bee practising and
improving their vocabulary, spelling and memory skills in a foreign language. We were
delighted that a number of students were successful in reaching the Regional Finals of the
Translation Bee in both French and German. They all performed very well and did a
fantastic job in representing the school. Charlotte King won the Regional selection for
German and Ozzadeh Tajalli came 5th in the Regional selection for French, meaning that
both students went through to the National Finals in Cambridge on 3rd July. At the Finals
both students performed very well against fierce competition and Charlotte secured 2nd
place in German and Ozzadeh Tajalli finished in the top 16 for the French Translation Bee.
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Students at the school speak about 32 languages including Irish, French, German, Spanish,
Hungarian, Dutch/Flemish, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Kurdish, Hebrew, Farsi/Persian, Arabic,
Mauritian Creole, Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, Urdu, Telugu, Gujarati, Bengali, Nepali, Sinhala,
Burmese, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Hong Kong Chinese, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Igbo,
Yoruba and Chichewa. Cultures and traditions emanate from the four corners of the world.
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Leaders of Tomorrow Programme
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The Leaders of Tomorrow Programme provides an opportunity for high achieving secondary students to develop leadership skills and qualities, to motivate them to achieve their full potential in their education and to inspire them to be ambitious leaders. It is run by the Stanway Learning Centre in partnership with ACS International School at Cobham. It’s undoubtedly a strange moment when you’re led into an empty room with three strangers (all teenagers - terrifying), rushed through introductions and told that this is how you’ll be spending the next day of your life. However this was, if you hadn’t guessed, the Leaders of Tomorrow Programme, during which ‘strange’ is apparently a requirement for whichever challenge the team is facing.
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The idea is simple. Twelve teenagers are chosen from various schools in Colchester, on judgement of an essay, and twelve teenagers are also chosen by their teachers from the ACS international school in Cobham. The course is designed to help them deal with the challenges of being a leader in the modern world and develop skills that you can’t learn in school. We began the course with a two-day residential in early November. The campus was around halfway between Colchester and the ACS school grounds, giving us a neutral place to begin the course. The first day of work lasted from 11am to 11pm, and almost the whole time was spent working competitively in teams. Each team was allocated their own room and throughout the day we faced a whole host of challenges to earn points, including building the tallest tower we could out of paper, preparing and performing a short dramatic piece (complete with impromptu poetry on our part), and a particularly intense half an hour spent solving riddles. Each task was undoubtedly stressful, but a very fun kind of stressful at that.
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Lucy Molnar
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