Oak Forest HS Celebrates World Language Week

Oak Forest High School Seniors Caroline Lilly and Rachel Greenhill get a henna tattoo from Senior Karina Soni during the World Language activity day held during World Language Week. Students were offered a choice of simple designs and several students applied the henna. When the henna dried, students had a fun tattoo and reminder of the cultural event. This is one of the activities at the World Language activity day during Oak Forest High School’s World Language Week celebration, held the week of March 7. The theme for the week is “Find the Missing Piece...Learn a Foreign Language.” During this week, students learned about other cultures, and experimented with various activities to expand their horizons. One of the interesting things students learned about is a person called a polyglot. This is a person who fluently speaks three languages or more. Students watched a presentation of a person, Tim Doner, who is known as a hyper-polyglott. He knows 20 languages well and can speak them fluently. Doner person spends most of his waking life learning languages and starts learning the language by watching TV or a video series because that helps him to learn the colloquial version of the language. Doner said, “Learning another language opens a person up to new ideas.” Students experimented with several activities. One was playing Scrabble in Spanish. Students could get their names written by ELL students in Arabic or Hindi, which many students found interesting because it was so beautiful. Students could also get artistic by creating Les Masques des Mardi Gras (Mardi Gras masks), pulseras (friendship bracelets), or they could exercise their minds by completing word searches on the various ways to greet one another in different languages.