Languages & Humanities

AboutLanguages

Language learning not only helps us communicate with others from around the world, but also enables us to become more tolerant, more creative and better problem-solvers. By encouraging our students to learn English and French in both our bilingual and English sections, we hope to open them up to the world and provide them with many exciting personal and professional opportunities.

Aboutour school Languages

As a locally-rooted international school, our students, teachers and staff live and learn in both the local French language and English on a daily basis. Our teachers are all French and English native speakers who guide each and every one of their students through their individual language journeys, whatever their age and cultural background.

We encourage our students to use both English and French as much as possible when at school, with friends and family, or alone with a good book. Events such as Book Week and “La Semaine de la Francophonie” help us to promote our two working languages and show students that language learning can be fun. Such events also give our students the chance to meet English and French-speaking authors as well as to compete linguistically against schools worldwide.

What’s more, our students are also given the option to learn German from Primary, and Spanish and/or Italian in Secondary.

AboutHome Languages

The organic development of a child’s mother tongue has been widely accepted as essential to the successful acquisition of an additional language.

We therefore endeavour to incorporate the richness of every student’s cultural and linguistic background into our lesson plans as this approach benefits the individual child, their classmates, and the entire school community. In addition to this, we also provide after-school “mother tongue” clubs to help our students develop skills in their native language.

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AboutBilingualism

We define bilingualism as the ability to use two or more languages on a regular basis in a variety of contexts and with a range of proficiencies. All bilingual section students get equal access to all areas of the curriculum in French and English, whether it be on alternating days in Infant and Primary or by studying half their subjects in English and the other half in French in Secondary.
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AboutHumanities

At Haut-Lac, we use the Learning Means the World multi-disciplinary themes approach to teach history and geography in Infant and Primary, and the IB Middle Years and Diploma programmes in Secondary. Students are encouraged to explore, interact and engage with key concepts and issues within history and geography by asking questions, researching and carrying out fieldwork, and critically analysing their results. They use both traditional academic resources and technological resources such as online maps and apps to engage with and share their learning.
We are also fortunate to have numerous museums and places of historical and geographical interest on our doorstep. Our students go on trips to the Charlie Chaplin Museum, the Red Cross Museum and the United Nations, as well as river trips, mountain trips, and the eagerly anticipated Secondary trips abroad, to name but a few, to stimulate and enrich their knowledge of classroom topics with excellent first-hand experiences.
Section-wide activities linked to the Humanities curriculum have also been added to the programme, such as our Primary Geography Day when students headed off on foot to different locations around school in search of various geographical elements linked to topics like road use and river erosion. Similar section-wide events have also been planned for history in 2019-2020.

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