Presenting the Comenius project in the primary school.

Wiktoria Cacace & Anita Kolibska

In October a group of students from our school visited the Czech Republic. We loved the whole trip, from the long, but not tiring at all train ride, to the long nights spent with our new friends from Sweden, Turkey and Czech Republic.

When we came back to Poland, we wanted to share our experiences with other people, so of course we took the opportunity to pretend we are teachers and present the Comenius project to the students from elementary school.

We brainstormed about how the lessons were going to look and this is how we decided to do it:

First of all we told the kids what Comenius was and how our school participates in it. Then, we presented some facts about the four countries that we are collaborating with: Sweden, Turkey, Czech Republic and Lithuania.

The last part of the presentation was the most exciting one, both for us and the kids. We looked up a few animals in each native language of the countries taking part in the project. After writing the name of the animal on the blackboard and reading it out loud to the kids, we asked for a couple of volunteers who wanted to try and guess the meaning of the foreign word and drawing the animal on the blackboard.

We weren't sure if the students will want to cooperate and take part in this little contest, so we were shocked by the amount of them wanting to volunteer! If someone got the animal right, they got one point that we added to their final score of the quiz, which was the final part of our visit in the elementary school.

For the youngest students, from 4th grade, we prepared an additional attraction: we let them taste ’Lazenske Oplatky’ - a traditional czech cookie that we bought while we were in Czech Republic.http://content.foto.mail.ru/list/zanechka/_forums/i-1398.jpg

The quiz contained questions about the culture of the four countries we presented, there even was an additional task for the most ambitious kids: they had to write down all the new English words that they had learned that day during our lesson.

After checking the tests, we found out that almost all kids had excellent results, so most of them obtained a special prize, which we handed them personally by the end of that week.

All in all the presentations were a big success, the kids found out more about the countries from the Comenius project and we hope we encouraged them to join the project in the future :) We hope we will be given the chance to do this more often, as we thought it’s a lot of fun for us and for the audience we were presenting to :)