On the 9th of June, the annual NCEA Japanese workshop was held at University of Canterbury. Nearly 400 students from 14 high schools in Canterbury and Selwyn regions were involved in NCEA focussed workshops run by Japanese teachers from other high schools and university lecturers. During the workshops, the students had chances to work on a variety of activities with university students and students from other schools. For morning tea, everyone enjoyed eating Japanese pastry and during closing ceremony there was a Japanese drumming performance. Canterbury regional speech competition was also held during a day at the workshop. Year 13 student, Kien Ngo talked about why he thinks Japanese language is great and ended up taking the title. It was the first time ever for a Shirley student to win the Japanese speech competition so it was an outstanding outcome. The boys represented the school well by fully engaging in the classes that they attended, and we received some positive comments from teachers from participating schools. One of the participating Year 11 student Reeve Kennington-Caldwell said that “The Japanese NCEA day was an interesting learning experience. I enjoyed learning from the teachers and the information that they had to teach.” Another Year 11 student Jack Bringans said that “It was fun interacting with the other schools and I learned a lot from teachers from those schools.”