Jayla
When it comes to the Olympics, what do you think of first? Your country’s national anthem and national flag, an image of professional athletes sweating on the sports field… What you probably wouldn’t think of is English competitions. Recently, an English Olympics was held at Luwan Senior High School. With reference to its literal meaning, you may be able to deduce that it is simply a competition about English proficiency, but different from the Olympic Games, our English Olympics is held once every year. Gradually, it has become a tradition at LWBC.
This year, the English Olympics lasted an entire three weeks, starting on March 21st and ending on April 4th. About a week before the English Olympics began, our principal Mr. Berg posted a sign-up sheet on the bulletin board in the hallway. Next to it, there was an appealing poster which introduced the events and explained the rules in detail. Right after classes finished, all the students rushed into the corridor to take a look. The grade 10s were especially excited. They were attracted because they just came to our school for a short time and they didn’t know much about the English Olympics. Therefore, this event seemed novel to them. In order to motivate everyone in the program to participate, all students were required to sign up for a minimum of 2 events.
The English Olympics consisted of different types of games. There were four this year: Transcribing, Boggle, Spelling Bee and Pronunciation Battle. The first two were held on March 21st. Students who participated in Transcribing needed to listen to a short recording on a loop and write a perfect transcription as fast as possible. I was one of the contestants. To be honest, I found some parts of the recordings challenging because the narrator was speaking with a British accent, which I’m not used to. Luckily, I earned second place in the finals. Next, students playing Boggle wrote down as many words as they could find on the boggle board in 1 minute. In this race between six house teams, the Yellow Honeybees emerged the victors.
The two other events took place on the following Wednesday, March 28th. In the Spelling Bee competition, the judge read out a word and each team worked together to correctly spell the word. This time, the Grey Sharks came out first. Last but not least, was the Pronunciation Battle. Students took turns reading passages in an English pronunciation APP named Liulishuo. Some students had used the APP before, and so they almost got a perfect score like 95 out of 100 in the competition. There was even a tie among the top 3 teams. Then April 4th was the big day for us, the finals. Students were gathered in the classroom to watch the games and support their teams. The result was fairly interesting: the Yellow Team, as well as the Grey Team, won first place twice respectively, Orange Tigers got second place three times, and at last, the Red Dragons earned the third place twice. Congratulations to the winners!
It has been a thrilling month. English Olympics is one of the mainstays of the BC program. Students always have a lot of fun on this annual event. More importantly, activities vary every year, so students don’t get bored. It’s also great to see all the students at LWBC sitting in one classroom playing the game and watching their house teams earn points. Indeed, we practice our English through the process of competing with each other. We learn while we are having fun.