European Day of Languages 2024

This year's celebration of languages was packed with various activities.

My Class 1 pupils sang the If you're happy song in Serbian to their eTwinning friends and learned a few basic words in their languages.

My Class 4 pupils received the Talk to me stickers, used the key to find out the languages, and tried to find the countries on the map. 

They also recorded video messages for their eTwinning friends.

Divided into 6 mixed teams of 3, my Class 5 pupils took part in fun quizzes about languages. Their task was to listen to 5 different people talking and guess the languages in a game called Look who's talking!, recognise fun facts in the general knowledge quiz, or choose a category and answer some trivia questions. A few volunteers said a few sentences in Romani, Spanish, German and Japanese and the others guessed the languages. We also sang a well-known song If you're happy in English. 

They also took part in the brainstorming activity with our eTwinning friends and shared their favourite L1 words.

As usual, the activity is part of the Council of Europe's Event Calendar.

Hello!

A lot of new faces, but an old introduction song, older than they are. My new generation of Class 1 pupils also enjoys singing it.

NQL 2024

Our eTwinning National Support Organisation has just awarded 239 international projects with Quality Labels. I'm happy and proud to say that the projects I collaborated on with my pupils have received the National Quality Labels:

• We Learn Together, We Grow Together: a very beautiful and inspiring example of how students can develop their skills and expand their horizons through different topics. By collaborating on creative tasks like a virtual dinner for underprivileged children, students improved their social skills, learned important lessons about empathy, tolerance and respect, and became more aware of the importance of cultural heritage. This project enabled students to build values that will surely have a lasting impact on their personal and social lives.
• Inspiring Museums: a wonderful way for students to explore the importance of museums in different cultures. Through cooperation with students and teachers from different European countries, students improved their language, ICT and social skills, as well as other 21st century skills, through various creative activities, using different ICT tools.

Dream After-School Club

 My Class 4 and Class 6 pupils have taken part in this year's OUP Project Competition, together with more than 1,300 pupils from 34  countries. They've watched a short film first, then shared ideas about different after-school clubs they would like to go to, and finally designed their posters in Canva.

by Teja, Mila, Nađa and Anđela

by Nina, Vukan, Nina and Tatjana

by Nikola, Luka, Aljoša and Vukašin

Far Away

This is the last song my Class 4 pupils have learned and loved. It's great for introducing or revising past forms, and a perfect announcement of summer holidays:

 Suzie went on holiday,
All the way to Spain.
She didn't want to go by air,
And so she took a train.

All my friends are far away,
I'm on my own today ...

Paula went on holiday,
To Australia.
She didn't read the flight number,
And flew to India.

All my friends are far away,
I'm on my own today ...

Danny went on holiday,
By ship to Mexico.
But Ben and Billy went by bus,
Now they're gone and so ...

All my friends are far away,
I'm on my own today.
But I'm not sad, I'm having fun,
I'm reading a great book. Hooray!

All my friends are far away ...

Our Town

Although this is a lovely song, we haven't sung it enough to learn it by heart:

Our town's got a lot of great things.
It's got a playground,
With a slide and some swings.
Our town is a great place to be.
It's got a lot of shops,
For you and for me.

Our town! Come to our town.
Our town! Come on, everyone.
Our town! Come to our town.
Our town! Come and have some fun.

Our town is a great place to stay.
It's got a park,
Where we can play all day.
Our town's got a nice swimming pool.
Jump into the water,
It's nice and cool.

Our town! Come to our town...

The Explorers

We've spent the whole year looking for clues and decoding messages with our book characters, and finally solved the last puzzle which took us to the statue of friendship and the end of our adventure.

The Explorers.
Here they come.
Lucy and Ben.
Adventure and fun.

The Explorers.
Here they are.
Ben and Lucy.
Action stars.

She's good at doing puzzles,
She always finds the clues,
And reads them very carefully,
They tell her what to do.

The Explorers ...

He's good at riding horses,
And swimming in the sea.
He's an action hero,
Just like you and me.

The Explorers ...

Bikes

This year, Class 4 pupils have learned a lot of great songs, but it seems that the one about bikes is everyone's favourite. It points out how playing outside with a friend is more important than having an expensive bike which is always in the garage, and is fantastic for introducing or revising comparatives and possessive forms:

Tom:
My bike is bigger
And faster than yours,
And more beautiful too.
My bike is lighter
And newer than yours,
And it's more expensive too.

Sue:
It's true that
Your bike is bigger
And faster than mine,
And it's more beautiful too.
Your bike is lighter
And newer than mine,
And it's more expensive too.

But I ride my bike every day,
In the sun and in the rain.
Your bike just stays inside,
It never comes out to play.

Tom: 
So, you ride your bike every day,
In the sun and in the rain.
I want to take my bike outside too,
Can I come out and play with you?
Can I come out and play with you?

Greetings

In our last lessons, we usually talk about different holiday activities and imagine that we're already somewhere else, having fun and writing postcards to our friends and family.

Stories

Favourite Sports

By following a simple model, my Class 3 pupils have written about their favourite team sports.

We've also completed a survey, similar to the one in their books, and here are the results:

Months

My Class 3 pupils seem to enjoy this song a lot, probably because the friendly crab in the video asks them to sing it in different ways:

Collaborative Games

My Class 4 pupils have used D-ID AI presenter to read the riddle and the answer to it: Morskie and created the drawing for the word 'imagination' in Dream Studio which were used in the Escape game from the riddles on project name acrostic and the Gallery of Riddles. 

My Class 6 pupils have used the information shared by all project partners and added a question in the collaborative Millionaire and the Mystery Breakout games, and added two questions, replaced the images in Room 2 and added tooltips for each exhibited piece in the Museum Escape Room collaborative game.

They also had fun creating an interactive game about famous artists of their own choice:

Different generations of my pupils enjoyed playing collaborative games. Most found them interesting and fun, but some thought they were challenging.

TALE Fast Forward

Two groups of my Class 8 pupils have recently visited the National Museum and took part in the workshops in English.

Before the visit, we talked about museums, whether they like visiting them or not, how we should behave there, and I showed them the presentation of our museum and the video showing how not to behave at the museum. I also asked them to guess the meaning of certain words.

The museum educators organised a tour of the permanent exhibition in English and later divided the pupils into five groups: Fashion, Cool Stuff, Before Selfies, Spin & Play, Chat & Chill. The pupils were asked to read and complete worksheets, answer riddles, match, design something, and later everyone shared their creative works and opinion.

Most pupils enjoyed the activities, some even did two worksheets, while a few complained about the reading and writing part of the activities.

What's the weather like?

A lesson filled with various games always turns out to be a success.

First, with the help of flashcards, we revised weather words. I asked my pupils about the weather outside, what kind of weather they like and don't like, why, and what we usually wear then.

After that, we drew a mind map, with weather symbols and I asked the volunteers to write the words. Everyone also wrote the sentences about what kind of weather they like and don't like in their notebooks, and a few pupils read their sentences.

Later, we read the story about the Sun and Wind together and did the quiz. Finally, I asked them to make groups of four for the station rotation activity. I reminded them what it means and distributed different tasks, all related to the weather topic: dominoes, popsicle sticks with parts of sentences, crossword, online matching game on the tablet and online hangman on the laptop.

The groups were a bit noisy, some finished faster than the others, and everyone enjoyed all the activities.