On Thursday 5th February, House Languages made a comeback!

Over 80 students took part representing their house and merged their drama and language skills.

Each house was given a theme and had to create a performance based on this. The themes were: at the airport, in the tourist information office, at the café, and at the hospital.

Foley’s performance, at the airport, included humour throughout and even showcased student’s musical talents on the violin, flute and ukulele! Graveney pupils used a whopping 13 different languages and their narrator really helped to set the scene in the tourist information office. The third performance was by Selvey, who brought back to life one of the greatest series from the 90s and noughties: F. R. I. E. N. D. S. Selvey pupils recreated the first iconic scene of the series, and we saw this scene twice! The first was entirely in French, and the second was performed using pupils’ home languages! Finally, Ottewell, our new House Language champions took us on a journey through the eyes of a doctor in the hospital. The Ottewell team showed us several scenes, including a surgery, a broken arm, a concerning eye test and the importance of EpiPens all whilst using a range of languages.

Everyone involved did a fantastic job, and it was very difficult to choose just one winner. These performances were the product of several rehearsals over the past few weeks, which were overseen by pupils in year 12. I would like to express my thanks to our sixth formers who helped create these performances and to Toby Bentley 10F2 and Joseph Bricknell 10G1 for their work on the lighting on the performance day.

This was a great opportunity for all involved to use any language that they are learning or speak and was also, in my view, a celebration of the diversity that we have at Balcarras.  

Mr Foakes