Granton Primary School

translator: sam holmes

Granton Primary School’s Year 5 students took on the Translation Nation challenge with the help of French teacher Sam Holmes.

When it came to sharing their stories from around the world, the children were very excited about reading out loud in their home languages. Several parents also visited the school to tell stories and sing songs from their many cultures and native languages, including Gujarati, Polish, Urdu and French. One student had even interviewed his next door neighbour to find a foreign language story to bring to the class.
Over the following days, the hub teams focused on polishing their translations and embraced the challenge of the creative writing process. It presented the perfect opportunity for the students to apply the literacy skills they had practised in their classrooms to produce fluent stories in English. The children absolutely loved creating costumes and props to accompany their completed translations and really looked forward to presenting them to an audience. A story originally told in Polish was picked by the audience as the winning translation.

Translation Nation at Granton Primary School was a special opportunity for the children and parents to bring their cultures together and understand more about each other. The teachers observed that the experience had empowered the multilingual children and boosted their confidence, as well as helping them to recognise their language abilities as a life long advantage. It was a valuable experience for the English speaking students too that helped them to develop empathy and admiration for their foreign language speaking friends. Additionally, Translation Nation helped the teachers to appreciate the fantastic language skills of their pupils and to see what a wonderful asset these are for the school.

Audio files

• The Wawel Dragon