A link-up between five European nations has helped pupils to blossom, explains Steven Potter, with activities from multimedia presentations through to gardening
Four years ago a group of like-minded primary school teachers from across Europe met at a conference. The result was a long-term project which would bring their pupils together too – both geographically and ‘virtually’ – to explore each other’s environments and cultures.
The project was entitled ‘Come Together Right Now’, and that is exactly what the pupils and teachers did at all six of the schools involved – through projects, visits, regular video conferencing and e-mails, exchanging ideas, collaborating, and regularly reflecting on their progress.
At the outset, our school, Plaistow and Kirdford Primary in West Sussex, agreed broad objectives for the project with our five partner schools in England, Germany, Italy, Norway and Spain. As well as teaching pupils about the environments of different European regions, the project would promote global citizenship and broaden their understanding of cultures and values elsewhere in Europe, in order to promote an attitude of respect, tolerance and empathy. It would also involve children from all the different cultural backgrounds, religions and ability levels in the partner schools.
The focus for the first year was to exchange multimedia presentations of pupils’ physical and socio-cultural environments. Pupils from across the project documented their schools and the surrounding areas, as well as a day in the life of a typical child from their school. These were then exchanged, viewed and discussed by all participants. (Pupils from the English schools were particularly interested by the fact that their counterparts elsewhere in the project did not have to wear uniforms.)
Also during the first year, teachers, pupils and parents visited our partner schools in Spain and Germany. Both trips involved a four-day stay, with at least two days spent in school. The children who took part in the trip to Germany stayed with host families and attended school with their new-found German friends.
Our German partner school, Wilhelm Schneller in Saxony, has a real focus on environmental awareness and has built gardening into the curriculum. Inspired by this idea, all the partner schools committed to creating their own ‘Comenius Gardens’ over the following year. These are now well-established.
At Plaistow and Kirdford, the gardening project has created a number of links with local producers, who have offered help with the construction and management of the garden. Each class has its own vegetable bed and last year we planted a variety of vegetables, mostly from seeds sent from the other partner schools in time for the spring term. During the autumn term we held a number of ‘parent markets’ at which we sold the fruits of our labour.
The Comenius Garden project in particular has permeated many areas of the curriculum, and is used wherever possible to strengthen teaching and learning. We have developed many maths activities around buying seeds, collecting money and giving change for the produce sold. Other partnership work has extended into other areas of the curriculum too; Year 3 pupils learning about the Vikings in history lessons e-mailed their new-found friends in Norway and were surprised to find that there were direct descendants of the Vikings in their parallel class.
At the beginning of the project, we decided that whenever we visited each other’s schools we would take a tree to plant in the grounds of the host school. This led to a number of competitions organised along our green theme, one of which gave all pupils an opportunity to create a piece of environmental artwork – perhaps taking the landscape artist Andy Goldsworthy as a source of inspiration. Some of the entries can be seen on our project website at www.come-together-right-now.org
In the second year, representatives from all the schools visited our Italian and Norwegian partners. Minde Skole sets aside one day a week for the whole school to go up into the mountains to learn about the outdoors. During our visit, pupils were learning to use a knife to carve wood, cook their own food, float boats down the stream and make whistles from birch trees. It rained all day but the school’s philosophy is: “It is not the weather that is the problem; it is the clothes people wear.”
One of the main projects this year again involved all schools creating and exchanging presentations, this time about an environmental concern that affected them. In response to the presentations, pupils in the partner schools were invited to suggest ways to approach the concerns and issues raised. Pupils also wrote poems about their environmental concerns, which were performed, recorded and posted on the project website.
We are now in the middle of the third year of the project and each school is focusing on a different environmental concern that is of particular relevance to their country or local area. In Spain, pupils at CEIP Ciudad de Jaen are focusing on reforestation after the disastrous fires in the summer. In Italy, Istituto Comprensivo di Arta ePaularo is looking at the catastrophic effect of urbanisation on rural life, and at Plaistow and Kirdford we are trying to encourage less car use by our pupils, parents and staff.
‘Come Together Right Now’ has been an excellent opportunity for our pupils, parents and staff to broaden their understanding of a range of European countries. Seeing first-hand the focus on learning outside in Norway, for instance, has really inspired us. We now spend more time learning outside: all our infant classes do so once a week in our Forest School. We have developed a partnership with the Sussex Wildlife Trust, and all pupils have visited a nearby common to study the social history of the area and take part in activities designed to put them back in touch with nature.
The project has also provided fantastic opportunities for professional and curriculum development through visits to, and collaboration with, our European partners and the other English school in the partnership. And by exploring the similarities and differences between themselves and their European counterparts, and their different environments and concerns, our pupils have learnt a great deal – in ways they might never have dreamed possible before the project began.
Steven Potter is headteacher at Plaistow and Kirdford Primary School in West Sussex
The teachers who set up ‘Come Together Right Now’ met at a Comenius school partner-finding conference. Comenius supports European school partnerships for both curriculum and school development.
For more information visit www.britishcouncil.org/comenius
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