The second meeting of the Russian Club for ILS international students was devoted to the topic: “Aleksandr Pushkin – Russia’s greatest poet”.

Ninth graders Yun Dokyung and Cho Sein, both from South Korea, and Mu Di, from China, gave a presentation on the poet’s life and works. After the presentation, they answered students’ questions.

At the meeting, the students and teachers also played the game “Snowball”, in which each participant had to name one work by a Russian poet, with the next repeating the name of this poem while adding one of their own, and so on around the circle, until only the winner remained.

“We also played a game called ‘Elias’,” reports Russian as a Foreign Language teacher Yulia Filatova. “Each player has to explain a word without using words with the same root. This was not an easy task for our international students, but they met the challenge well.”

The winners were as follows:

1^st place: Jonas Derks, section 5M2, from the Netherlands

2^nd place: Bastian Derks, grade 2, from the Netherlands

3^rd place: Fujinaga Eita, section 5M2, from Japan

“The Russian language is by no means easy to learn,” notes ILS Principal Olga Shevchenko. “When playing language games, however, the children are not shy about using Russian at the level their knowledge permits. The teachers keep track of every student’s efforts, doing all they can to ensure that each makes good progress. These club meetings also help our students to immerse themselves further in Russian culture.”