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.

EQL 2024

The eTwinning European Quality Labels (a total of 17453) for 2104 projects carried out during the 2023/24 school year were awarded on 12 November 2024. I'm proud to say that the projects I collaborated on with my pupils are among them:

• Inspiring Museums and
• We Learn Together, We Grow Together.

My Favourite Sandwich

Both groups of my Class 4 pupils accepted my suggestion, prepared their favourite sandwiches at home, brought them to school, presented them to their classmates, and finally enjoyed eating them together.

Exemplar Lesson Plan

I am happy that the lesson plan about the weather I carried out last year with my Class 4 pupils has been commended in the international competition organised by Eduka Publishing Company.

The promotion of the Collection of all winning and commended lesson plans was organized on 24 October at the Book Fair in Belgrade.

Sing a Rainbow

The all-time favourite song about the colours of the rainbow enjoyed and sung by new Class I1 pupils:

Meet me

 I've introduced my Class 4 pupils to easy avatar making website, so they quickly created their digital characters, downloaded and used them to introduce themselves to their eTwinning friends. They reviewed the parts of the head, used their creativity, practised writing and digital skills, and had fun along the way.

Finger Family

 Learning family members with finger puppets and a catchy tune can be a lot of fun.

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.