Galician school visit

Today we visited the school in Bande (Galicia). The pupils were awaiting us with a huge smile but also quite a big dose of curiosity.

Our group was represented by Italy, Poland and Turkey and we focused on European diversity by introducing our own countries and culture. We prepared the program the day before, following the ‘clap method’. The five pupils were seven years old, they were quite active, curious and lively, so we tried it was a challenge to keep their attention on a high level constantly. First we introduced ourselves in our own languages, than we played a warm-up dance game (by using music from each country) to make them comfortable and create a connection between us. Later we showed a map of Europe with no borders asking the kids to find our countries on it. We were asked how long did it take to come to Galicia and which means of transport did we use. We also showed some sights, curiosities and typical dishes of our regions and countries (e.g. balloons in Cappadocia, gondolas in Venice, salt mine in Wieliczka). The finishing game was to throw a cube with every day words in all our languages (except of Spanish) and try to pronounce and understand them. The second round was about asking basic questions of daily live to get to know them better. In the end we did a short evaluation and asked them to create faces with given stickers about their feeling about our meeting/lesson. We are looking forward to receive their drawn feedback.

We tried to adapt the program to the needs of the children and also tried to balance the learning and gaming moments to stay efficient as lesson moderators.

We really hope the kids learned, that our strength is in diversity, although our backgrounds are different.

Huriye (TR) | Ludovica (IT) | Marcin (PL)

PS Maria — muchas gracias por la traducción