Year 7 and 8 pupils have recently participated in an MFL Spelling Bee. Initially competing within classes, pupils were all given a minute to spell out some vocabulary they had been learning using the target language alphabet. Winners from each class competed in an inter class competition and those winners then went on to compete against some students from Dartford Grammar School in the Inter-School Spelling Bee. BGS came out winning the German (Selin Batmaz), Japanese (Renée Swaroop), Italian (Chiara Stibbons) and French (Alejandro Gonzalez-Puertas). A very well done to all the pupils who took part so enthusiastically in the whole competition. 

Mrs Watkins, MFL Department

To prepare for the MFL Spelling Bee, I used only one method. I would copy and write down the list of words from the document to commit the words to memory. After that, I would highlight the words in different colours to memorise the genders(der, die, das) which would come before the actual word. To begin with, I was quite nervous on the day, although I was feeling quite confident. I managed to achieve joint 3rd place with a person from Dartford Grammar with only one point between me and the next Dartford student. My teammate (Selin) secured the victory by at least eight points for Bexley Grammar. My thanks to her. My favourite part of the experience was talking to the people from Dartford and seeing the similarities and differences in how we are taught German. Though I also enjoyed listening to the other languages and trying to recognise their similarities to other languages.

Septus Thorne, Year 7 

I was fortunate enough to be chosen out of my form to enter the spelling bee against a few of my peers from other classes. This I was very excited and pleased about, and I worked very hard in the weeks before to perfect my knowledge of the words on the list, some of which were easier and others were quite challenging! When the moment came, I was relatively nervous as I didn't know how good my opponents would be and there were a few words which I wasn't confident in. It turned out that my opponents were very talented, and it was a nice challenge to try and score as highly as possible! As an outcome of scoring highly in the previous challenges, I then went on as 1 of 2 students who represented BGS in German against Dartford Boys' Grammar School. I think that I was successful in this round with spelling 33 words in 1.5 minutes, and I thoroughly enjoyed this experience throughout the whole process. 

Selin Batmaz, Year 7