On Friday, November 17th, the Wells community gathered at Wells On Nut Campus for International Day 2023, with this year’s theme being ‘Celebrating Language & Culture’. International Day is a day for the entire school to come together and celebrate the diversity of our student, teacher, and staff population, as well as recognize, appreciate and learn about other cultures around the world. This event aligns well with our ESLR of Global Citizenship and the IB concept of ‘international mindedness’. In an increasingly diverse world, our goal is to continue to remain open-minded to worldwide diversity and differences, and to practice acceptance and respect as an international attitude.
Celebrating Language & Culture
With this year’s theme being ‘Celebrating Language & Culture’, our language clubs organized a special Language & Culture week to spread awareness about the diverse range of languages spoken by our community members.
Currently, we have six cultural/language clubs: ASL club, Chinese club, Desi club, Japanese Club, Korean club and Thai club. These clubs collaborated to create a fun week celebrating languages through different activities like teaching Thai to teachers, performing the National anthem in ASL, or teaching various languages and cultural games to younger students. ASL taught community members how to sign different emotions in American Sign Language, as can be seen in this video.
During International Day, the main focus was investigating how people celebrate different cultures and languages around the world. Primary shared their bulletin boards, which explored languages around the world and middle and high school students and clubs hosted informative booths with interactive activities from various countries and regions around the world.
There was also a flag parade with community members proudly displaying their flags and celebrating diversity as a community. Performances from various cultures were given by Wells performers, including Korean club, Desi club, breakdance club, our teachers, parents and other talented performing artists in our school community.
Service for Operation Smile
Initiated by our Wells SerWIS Club, a majority of the proceeds raised from our homerooms and student-led clubs were donated to Operation Smile Thailand, and proceeds raised with our class and club booths were donated to this and other club-related causes as part of our community emphasis on service.
Overall, International Day 2023 turned out to be a huge success and an exciting day of collaboration, community, and celebration among all of our staff, students, teachers, and parents in which smiles and laughter demonstrated our shared sense of community and diversity. A very special thank you goes to Ms. Kan, our Visual & Performing Arts Department, our language clubs and everyone else who contributed their hard work and effort into creating a very memorable event!
