Nov 27

Nov 27 Vocab Express Champions: Landmark's language learners excel

Curriculum, Primary, Secondary, Languages

For a week in November every year Landmark competes in the Vocab Express League of Champions. This year the school excelled being victorious in the Piccolo Cup a competition for schools with 150 or less participants and finishing in the top 10 for the overall competition.

In this blog we have the thoughts of some of our students about their week of competition and learning.

Hannah, year 6

Vocab Express is a competition that happens once a year. Students and schools from around the world participate in the wonderful language game. At school, we have lessons just for us to work on our language skills on Vocab Express. It's so much fun, you can do almost any language (as long as it is available) from French to Ancient Greek! You can also try out a new language, this year, I tried out Urdu, and it was really exciting as it was the first time I had ever seen a dialect with so many symbols I didn't recognise! You get points from completing blocks (language blocks are slabs where we can do English to chosen language you are doing chosen language to chosen language or chosen language to English) this year we were in the top 10 in the world (Genius Cup)! We also came 1st in the Piccolo Cup, which is the tier for the smaller schools like us. One of our students came in the top 40 in the Student Leader board in the entire world!

Harry, year 9

The Vocab Express contest meant I had lots of friendly competition with my friends and I'm sure it did the same for other students. It has helped my vocabulary in multiple ways, such skills as writing,listening and translating.

One of the many funny things that happened was competing with Penny late at night fighting for ninth position in the School Geniuses.

Next time round I think I would experiment with more languages.

Motivation comes from two places for me: my own raw competitiveness and my friends encouraging me.

My advice for somebody competing for the first time is to compete against yourself and not others and to try your best.

Sana, year 10

I think that Vocab Express is an exciting competition that the students at Landmark have the privilege of participating in. The competition helps increase our vocabulary in many languages such as French, Spanish, Latin, Greek, Japanese, German, Hebrew and many more.

This is due to the fact that you have to complete a certain word block twice if you make even the slightest error. You get involved in the competition as you are able to gain a number of points only after completing a word block. Because of this, we were able to gain a high number of points and we reached first place in the Overall Piccolo Cup.

This means that we have something truly special in our school because we can win high scale, global competitions like these, and yet we are small.

I think the high point for me was that I came first place in the world in Latin, at one point in time. I found that very pleasing!

I think the motivation I had was that I had a competition with Nathan and I wanted to beat him, hence I tried my best to overtake him in the leader board. Next time I would try and increase my typing speed so that I can gain more points at a faster speed than previous years.

Overall I think that Vocab Express is a fantastic competition we participate in and I hope to achieve even higher medals next time!