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.

Words of Wonder

My Class 1 pupils and I have invited our friends from the Cultural Bridges Across Europe eTwinning project to create a mini-dictionary of positive words in our languages and were happy when they joined us. It was a perfect way to celebrate Kindness Day and spread joy and positivity across our project.

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.

Hallowe'en 2024

As usual, the lesson about Hallowe'en was a lot of fun for my pupils. 

First, I introduced my youngest pupils to the holiday. Then, I asked them to imagine we celebrated Hallowe'en and to think about what kind of costume they would wear. Finally, we learned the Knock, Knock song and used their drawings to record our own version.

In teams, my Class 4 pupils wrote short poems on the topic. First, each of them wrote down 4 things that came to their mind when they heard the word Hallowe'en. Later, in their chosen teams, they compared the words and used the most common ones to write 3-line poems. Each group read their poems aloud and received feedback from their peers.