Following on from the "Gaelic in English schools" campaign in the West Highland Free Press last year, I contacted one of the primary schools in West Lothian suggesting they include some Gaelic to the children. They felt it would be useful to do this as part of Scots week. So I took a morning out from my day job today and spent it giving a few hundred children an introduction to the languages, some phrases, songs, history and customs etc. The day went very well and one approach I took was to first off highlight Gaelic words they were using every day (placenames, personal names) and didn't realise it and also various words in English of Gaelic origin (e.g. Pet, Trousers), as well as the more usual Ceilidh, Glen etc and what they originally meant. The day went very well with some children coming up to me after school and saying "ciamar a tha thu". Another child said that they had wanted me to stay for longer.
One unexpected mnemonic was "Martian lad" for "mar sin leat". In any case I have put the material online here incase anyone else might find it useful:
http://www.siliconglen.com/craig/gaelicintroduction.doc
It's more aimed at the upper ages of primary school but the songs went down well with the younger ones, especially the puirt a beul.
Something like this could form a useful model for rolling out across more English medium in schools in Scotland, to counter the widespread ignorance of the language.
Craig
By Craig Cockburn, IT Professional from Scotland. Digital Transformation, Agile Management, Politics and Social change
Total Pageviews
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Popular Posts
-
Having been on hold to the Orange contact centre (I guess that's what you would call it, I might call it a non-contact centre) for appro...
-
In a breathtaking act of complete user ignorance, the so called new user experience of Windows Vista is now significantly harder to shut dow...
-
An article on how Agile can sit alongside PRINCE2 and where DSDM Atern fits in. In 2007, I put "used an Agile/PRINCE2 development str...
-
For some unknown reason Google has removed the very useful BlogThis feature from the Google toolbar. However if you want the BlogThis functi...
-
Trying a bit of reverse marketing here to see whether posting to Google Groups: uk.jobs.wanted and also to Ebay.co.uk in an unconventional...
-
Another government IT disaster. 10 years behind schedule, the Dunblane gun register is 'unfit for purpose' . The article also mentio...
-
The scene: A person on vacation walks into a late night store to buy some nuts. Present: The person, a shop assistant and a selection of ta...
-
Find me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/siliconglen/ Medium https://siliconglen.medium.com/ thanks Craig
-
There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Lat...
-
All In the last few months, I have seen the traffic to this blog rise to a reasonable level and there's been a lot of diverse comments a...
No comments:
Post a Comment