Mother Tongue Day – Thursday 21st February
Dear Parents and Guardians,
Thursday 21st February is International Mother Tongue Day and it is being celebrated within the ESF and here at Sha Tin College all this week.
Amongst our students 45% speak English at home, 47% Cantonese (26% exclusive and 21% Cantonese and English), 4% Mandarin and 4% speak the following languages (Korean, Hindi, Japanese, French, Danish, Dutch, German, Hebrew, Italian, Och, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, Nepali, Turkish, Tamil, Urdu, Malayalam, Putonghua).
It is important to recognise and protect the diversity of languages around the world and we have organised events all week at STC to celebrate Mother Tongue Day.
Among the events being organised, there will be an ESF Mother Tongue quiz on Thursday morning during tutor time, student displays of proverbs from around the world, a visit from the poet Nashua Gallagher on Thursday, TED talks on SMART, a QR Hunt around the school, a language recognition competition and signature dishes from around the world at the cafe.
Dress code for Thursday is the colour of students’ national flags. It is very important that students understand this is not a non-uniform day. It will be colour of their flag OR school uniform. Students will be expected to talk about the colours and their flags to their tutor if asked. So they need to research their flag and the significance of the colour.
We hope that it will be an interesting and informative experience, and encourage the whole community to be a part of it.
CLICK HERE for a Ted Talk about the importance of Mother Tongue. I hope you will enjoy it.
Kind regards,
Mrs. Raluca Paraschivescu
Head of European Languages
