Christmas 2024

Two weeks before winter holiday have been pretty busy.

Class 1 and Class 4 pupils enjoyed making their cards for our friends from Lithuania, Romania, Spain, Taiwan, Türkiye and the USA.

Together with their friends from Croatia, Greece, Romania and Türkiye, Class 7 pupils created a digital card. They added some lights and the gingerbread man to the Christmas tree and put the image of the elf's legs in the snow. They also added some spring images to April in the collaborative calendar.

Class 1 pupils learned the famous song about Santa with ease.

 

They also joined the GSA contest and designed their baubles as a group. Everyone put their unique touch on them.

We organised online meetings with our friends from Mallorca and the Canaries on 10 December and New York on 17 December, shared how we celebrate Christmas and New Year, and sang We Wish You a Merry Christmas song.

As part of the Festive Coding activity, Class 4 pupils had fun coding in Scratch and drawing using Pixel Art while as part of the Eco-Coding Wonderland activity, Class 7 pupils enjoyed collaborating on the design of a virtual sustainable city with a Christmas theme. With their project partners, they also created and played a digital escape room game and decorated a virtual Christmas tree with eco-friendly ornaments.

Sustainable Future

To inspire my Class 7 pupils to explore environmental issues and sustainable practices, I decided to involve them in the eTwinning project Sustainable Future: Our Actions, Our Impact.

We started by completing pre-surveys and discussing the SDGs in the lesson and online, on the forum.

In teams, my pupils designed logos and later voted for the best ones in their opinion. We also created a video introduction for our project.

The topic of food waste really captured my pupils' interest. They created surveys on food waste at school and at home and conducted them among Class 5-8 pupils. They analysed the results and used AI Music Generator to create a rock song about food waste at home called Wasted Plates and a disco song about a balanced diet called Healthy Vibes.

They got creative with recipes that use leftovers, which helped them understand how important it is to reduce food waste and make the most of available resources. 

Collaborative cookbook

Click to read this book, made with Book Creator

read.bookcreator.com

Where is?

Whenever I want to introduce my youngest pupils to the rooms of the house, I play this song. With memorable moves and yeahs, it always proves to be a success.

Where's Grandpa?
In the dining room.
What's he doing?
He's eating fish.

Where's Simon?
In the living room.
What's he doing?
He's watching TV.

Where's Suzy?
In the bathroom.
What's she doing?
She's having a bath.

 Where's Stella?
In her bedroom.
What's she doing?
She's reading a book.

Where's Grandma?
In the hall.
What's she doing?
She's opening the door.
And going to the kitchen.

 

How many?

This is yet another old song which is great for learning numbers and plurals. It's always enjoyed by my youngest pupils:

How many, how many, how many?
Ten girls, ten girls.
How many, how many, how many?
Nine boys, nine boys.

(Eight windows, Seven doors, Six footballs, Five bikes, Four chairs, Three tables, Two rubbers, And one ruler.)

Thanksgiving Day 2024

As a warm-up, I asked my Class 1 pupils what made them happy and what they were thankful for in their lives. Their family members who always spend time with them, play with them or make some delicious food for them, their home, toys, pets, food, water and air were just some of the things they mentioned. 

Then, I asked them to imagine we had a holiday to give thanks for all the things we've got and asked them to share how they would celebrate it. 

Later, I showed them a short video about how the Americans got the idea to start such a holiday, and, since in two groups I only had my tablet with me, not everyone was able to see everything at the same time, so we compared what we saw and completed the story.

As a follow-up, I asked them to draw their hand and use each finger to draw what they were thankful for in their lives, and here's how they did it.

PS We've shared the videos with our eTwinning friends.

Thankful Tunes

This autumn, we've joined the eTwinning project Thankful Tunes: A Thanksgiving Celebration. I thought that it would be interesting for my pupils to learn more about Thanksgiving while collaborating with their peers from different countries and improving their language skills through music.

First, we completed pre-surveys, then designed and voted for logos. Teams from three different generations of my pupils got creative and had a lot of fun. 

We used words like family, gathering, pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce to create a word cloud in WordArt.

We also joined online meetings, introduced our schools, congratulated the logo contest winner (a girl from Spain), and sang our well-known song about cherries.

Both Class 1 and Class 5 pupils enjoyed the letter drawing activity. In groups, my youngest pupils drew Thanksgiving symbols on letters P and T, while the older ones coloured the letters in ScrapColoring.

My older pupils left a few comments on the forum, including their favourite tongue twisters on the topic and their pumpkin pie recipe.

My Class 7 pupils added a few lines to the collaborative acrostic poem and tried several AI-generated music tools before choosing a country song they really liked. They also agreed that all the versions sounded pretty similar. Finally, they added the audio to the document.

Places in a Town

We started the lesson with a guessing activity. The pupils looked at the poster and answered questions like,

• Where do you go when you want to see a film? Is there a cinema in our town?
• Where do you go when you want to play with your friends, ride a bike or swing?
• Where do you go when you want to buy some bread? Is there a bakery near your house?

In this way, we revised different buildings and their locations.

Then, I informed them that we would switch to the station rotation activity and reminded them what it includes.

In teams, the pupils sat down at different desks with tasks. I informed them that they had to finish their task before moving to the next station clockwise:

• Online Spelling Game: Play an online game to check the spelling of different places.
• Building Description: Read descriptions and stick different buildings where they belong on a map.
• Place Guessing Game: Play an online game to guess the correct place based on clues.
• Dialogue Practice: Order the dialogue and act out a situation in the street to practice giving directions.
• Neighbourhood Design: Design a perfect neighbourhood in 3D or as a physical poster.

Finally, I asked my pupils to use small pieces of paper and write something they liked on one side, with a heart or a plus, and something they would change or improve on the other side.

As a follow-up, I asked them to complete the tasks in their books related to places in the town.