Session Five - Saturday 4th February 2012

We’re back at Forest School on a February morning for a day of language, linguistics and code breaking. We started breakfast club with the Getting to Know You exercise – learning about what our fellow students liked, were good at and what annoyed them. This involved a lot of scampering about the Hall, asking questions and writing down the answers in a competition to be first to collect the most responses. We were slightly puzzled by the person who gets annoyed by prawns…

Today Miss Hall from St Angela’s and Miss Carmichael from Forest took us on a journey of languages ancient and modern and taught us how to develop and crack codes. We learn that language is like a science – you need to look for patterns. 

The lessons started with a quiz looking at different European languages. We looked in more detail at Swedish words and how to establish rules for words.

We went on to look at the origins of English words. Latin may be an old language but the Emerging Scholars managed to surprise their teachers with how much Latin they already knew and all thanks to Harry Potter! So if you wondered what your daughter gets out of reading those books and watching those movies, well now you know they really do contribute to academic improvement.

Break time was getting a little quiet so we introduced a new ball game, most of which involved seeing how many balls could be aimed at Simon’s head at the same time.

We practised writing the Greek alphabet and translating English words into Greek including writing our own names in Greek. We learned of the value of Latin and Greek in medicine and a number of girls left the session with plans to learn more Latin and Greek to help them in their medical careers in the future. This helped increase the relevance of the session and breathed new life into the languages.

One of the most enjoyable parts of the day was the code breaking. You need particular skills to be a good code breaker. You need to think carefully, to be able to spot patterns (also useful in Maths), to be analytical and think about what is in front of you. You need to develop your problem solving skills and a little quiet and a lot of focus really helps.

There was a challenge to create codes for other people and get them to break them – all in a competitive spirit. We had background music from Mission Impossible just to add a little extra pressure. 

The girls developed a number of codes and we look forward to trying these out on parents at the End of Year event!