Slide thumbnail

Celebrating Languages in Portsmouth Week

16 – 20 March 2026

You are here: / / Celebrating Languages in Portsmouth Week

‘Sharing and Belonging’

We welcome and encourage colleagues from across Portsmouth to join in our week of Celebrating Languages – an opportunity to recognise and celebrate the many languages and cultures which are an integral part of our community.

Please have a look at the following activities and suggestions for your celebrations and take part in whichever way you are able.

We would love to have a record of participation, so please send mini-reports and photographs of your events for us to upload to the Portsmouth, City of Languages website.

A message from Stephen Morgan MP

It’s great to receive these words of recognition and praise from Portsmouth South MP, Stephen Morgan. We know he still remembers with fondness his language lessons at Priory School!

“I want to thank everyone involved in creating and celebrating the Week of Celebrating Languages in Portsmouth. The City of Languages song video is a fantastic showcase of the talent, diversity and creativity in our local schools, and I am grateful to all the teachers, performers and partners who helped bring it to life.

“Portsmouth is proud to be a city where many languages are spoken every day. Languages help us connect with one another, broaden our horizons and understand the world around us, and it is inspiring to see so many young people embracing and celebrating them.

“My thanks to all involved for your hard work and dedication, and for continuing to champion language learning across our city.”

Watch our special welcome from BBC Weatherman, and former Portsmouth student, Tomasz Schafernaker…

Please watch this video from Portsmouth North MP, Amanda Martin, in which she sends supportive messages about our efforts to ‘Celebrate Languages in Portsmouth’.

Activities and suggestions

Summarising the Week of Celebrating Languages 2026

Daily Theme Ideas

Monday: Language Welcome Day

  • Have older students or multilingual staff greet students at the entrance in different languages.
  • Create a “Welcome Wall” with greetings written in the various languages spoken by students.

Tuesday: Cultural Dress Day

  • Encourage students to wear traditional clothing representing their cultural heritage.
  • Host a fashion show where students explain the significance of their attire.

Wednesday: Global Storytelling

  • Invite parents or community members to share traditional stories or folktales in their native languages.
  • Organise read-aloud sessions with bilingual books in classrooms.

Thursday: Language Workshops

  • Conduct short language lessons where students learn basic phrases from each other’s native languages.
  • Have students create posters showcasing key phrases or proverbs from different languages.

Friday: International Food Day

  • Invite students and their families to bring in dishes from their cultures for a tasting event.
  • Ask students to present the recipes and talk about the dishes, including names and main ingredients in their language.

Ongoing Activities

Language and Culture Showcase Board

  • Create a display where students contribute facts, pictures, and stories about their cultural backgrounds.

World Music Breaks

  • Play music from different countries during breaks or assemblies throughout the week.

Multilingual Choir or Performance

  • Prepare a song or short performance where students sing or speak lines in various languages.

  Pen-Pal Exchange

  • Pair students within the school to write notes to each other in their first languages, teaching translations to their peers.

Flag and Map Activity

  • Display a world map and have students place pins or stickers to represent their country of origin, along with a small flag and fact.

Special Event Ideas

Cultural Assembly

  • Host an assembly where students showcase traditional dances, songs, or other performances.

Language Buddies

  • Pair older students with younger ones to teach them simple phrases in a different language.

Art from Around the World

  • Have students create artwork inspired by different artists from around the world and hold an exhibition.

International Cinema

  • Show short films or clips in different languages (with subtitles) and discuss them.

Daily Language Spotlight

  • Each day, highlight a different language with facts, stories, and photos (remember that EMAS have lots of these presentations). We may nominate one of the five most widely spoken languages in Portsmouth for each day of the ‘Celebrating Languages in Portsmouth Week’.

Interactive and Fun Activities

Recipe Exchange Booklet

  • Collect favourite recipes from students’ families to create a school booklet, shared digitally or printed. We are going to do this as a Portsmouth City of Languages project.

Traditional Games Day

  • Teach and play games from different cultures, such as Lotería from Mexico or Kabaddi from South Asia.

Language Scavenger Hunt

  • Organise a scavenger hunt where students find clues and learn words in different languages.

Cultural Dance Class

  • Host a dance workshop introducing steps from popular traditional dances around the world.

Classroom resources for learners have been shared with subscribing schools in the monthly EMAS bulletins, and taster PowerPoints for the city’s ‘top’, or most widely-spoken languages will be sent daily.

The resources include information about the countries where the different languages are spoken and lots of fun languages facts and figures, for younger and older learners.

Look out, too, for interesting languages facts posted daily on Portsmouth City Council’s social media.

**And, remember, please share with your colleagues across your settings – these resources most definitely shouldn’t remain in the domain of languages, they can be shared and enjoyed in lots of ways, from tutor-time to geography lessons, from English to PSHE. These resources are about all of us and for all of us.

Twinkl, primary resources provider, has been incredibly supportive of our City of Languages initiative and has created two resource packs as part of Lightning Languages:

The display materials could be used during the week, and also to advertise celebrations in advance.

The materials are free – it’s only necessary to register for an account.

Twinkl has also offered to put on live languages lessons in French and Spanish for learners in KS1 and KS2 on Wednesday 18 March 2026.

For KS1

Lingua Cub, the curious young companion of Ursa Lingua, invites early years and KS1 learners (ages 3–7) to an online French and Spanish lesson accompanied by a fun activity pack!

Children will explore the French and Spanish-speaking world, discover what they already know and practise greetings with Lingua Cub through playful activities, songs and games. Perfect for both specialist and non-specialist teachers, the live sessions can be enjoyed in the classroom with learners joining online.

Spanish: Watch the recording

French: Watch the recording

For KS2

Ursa Lingua, the bear of many languages, invites KS2 learners (ages 7–11) to a live French and Spanish lesson with a fun activity pack!

Delivered by experienced educators from Twinkl’s Lightning Languages team, these fun-filled online lessons will spark children’s enthusiasm through party-themed games, activities and new vocabulary. Perfect for both specialist and non-specialist teachers, the live sessions can be enjoyed in the classroom with learners joining online.

French: 1pm – 1.45pm
Meeting link: Ursa Lingua’s French Party | Microsoft Teams

Spanish: 2pm – 2.45pm
Meeting link: Ursa Lingua’s Spanish Party (KS2) | Microsoft Teams

Resources:

Introducing our song for Portsmouth, City of Languages, starring learners from Wimborne Primary, St Jude’s, St Swithun’s, Trafalgar, Admiral Lord Nelson and Mayfield. Please share far and wide with colleagues and families and learners. And why not prepare your own version to perform at an assembly or to create a video to share with families and carers and friends?

The video will be played regularly during this Week of Celebrating Languages on the Big Screen in the Guildhall Square (probably about twenty minutes past each hour).

Head to the Portsmouth Music Hub website to download resources to help you create your own version of the song, including backing track, score and lyrics.

Worksheets are available to schools which support pupils learning more about the city’s different twinning partners.

As a treat for little ones, there will be an opportunity to listen to, and join in with, traditional songs and stories in different languages, including at the regular morning Rhyme Time sessions on Monday 16 and Thursday 19 March 2026. Languages-themed activities will also be on offer for older learners.

Mama Lisa’s World is a great website for finding songs and rhymes from across the world.

Why not add a note to newsletters to families and caregivers with information about Celebrating Languages and ask for volunteers to come in to school and share aspects of their language and culture and traditional stories and rhymes?

And why not think about organising a multilingual marathon, where learners can read and share stories in their home language? Or carry out a survey to find out what books your learners may read at home in their home language?

How amazing would it be to give multilingual learners the chance to demonstrate their linguistic superpowers!

Students and staff at City of Portsmouth College (CoPC) are gearing up to complete an ambitious project, involving the different campuses and different curriculum areas, including media and visual arts.

Messages of congratulations will be sent, via an inhouse-produced video, to Portsmouth on achieving 100 years of being a city – messages that will be conveyed in 100 different languages, taking advantage of the diverse languages skills and heritages of the CoPC community.

We hope that this amazing artefact will be launched during the Celebrating Languages Week – watch this space, it’s going to be so exciting!

On behalf of the Association for Language Learning (ALL), Tanya Riordan from the University of Portsmouth has been compiling a series of clips from videos of ‘languages champions’ and incorporating them into short lesson plans.

These might be something to use with older learners during the week, or, indeed, at any time. The videos last approximately 10 minutes each and could be used as starter activities, by getting students to think about what makes a good language person and how they too can become successful linguists.​​

Download the lesson plans

Why not ask your learners to create a poster inspired by our Week of Celebrating Languages, and including our theme of ‘Sharing and Belonging’? You could use these around your setting, or they could be displayed in libraries around the city.

Please contact [email protected] if you would like to take part.

Calligrams are a beautiful way to allow learners to demonstrate their creativity linked to languages. Inspire your learners and show them examples created for the Association for Language Learning and Express Yourself North-East Festival:

Send us pictures of learners’ creations and we will post them on the Portsmouth, City of Languages website.

And here are more display ideas from Rachel Milne at Solent Road:

Havant and South Downs College (HSDC) is ‘home’ to many young people from Portsmouth. To support our Celebrating Languages Week, HSDC colleagues plan to run a multilingual writing competition for younger and older learners in which they can submit a short story or poem in another language, with an English translation. The intention is to give the young authors an opportunity to share their stories and poems about their experiences of belonging to a multicultural city.

There will be prizes for different categories and HSDC colleagues hope to compile a selection of competition entries into a ‘real’ book which can be shared with schools across the city.

Submission deadline: Friday 17 April 2026

Find out how to take part

The recently-formed Sherlock Club is a support and networking group for deaf children and/or deaf families in Portsmouth.

They are going to make ‘Celebrating BSL’ a focus for the group on Friday 20 March 2026. There will be a pop-in session in the Central Library Café between 11am and 1pm with BSL activities planned and flyers and information available.

Several schools in the city are also planning to learn signed songs during the Celebrating Languages week.

This year the University of Portsmouth’s One World celebrations kick off in the week following our celebrations. On Friday 27 March 2026, there will once again be a Festival of Cultures, full of amazing sights and sounds and tastes and smells. Invitations to attend are being extended to primary and secondary schools.

To find out more, contact Rebecca Britti at ALNS ([email protected]).

The One World Festival website is now live and can be accessed via the promotional materials. You can also watch a promotional video about the festival.

This three-month long festival offers a huge programme of events, many of which are open to schools across the country.

View the UK schools programme online or download a PDF to explore all of the events and activities taking place.

Both have all the links to events and activities – check the relevant activity page for details and you will find the registration details under the ‘How do I get involved?’ section on each activity page.

Raquel Cabo, MFL teacher and inclusion lead at HSDC, has used AI to create a podcast on ‘Why English alone is not enough’.

Listen now