Nowi Przyjaciele w Kawkowie (New friends in Kawkowo)

youth peacebuilders multipliers visiting a local school in Kawkowo #YPBM

Nowe Kawkowo is a place in the North-East of Poland that has almost all beauties of nature which make you feel very peaceful. The aim why we came to this place is a project called Youth Peacebuilders Multipliers #YPbM

Today, we were invited by the principal of the primary school in Kawkowo in order to meet the kids and teach them about different cultures, languages, diversity in Europe and learn how Polish Education system works in a small town like Nowe Kawkowo.

While planning our workshop, we were taking in consideration the needs of the children from Kawkowo. We have been told that they do not have a lot of contact with people from abroad and seldomly travel. Therefore we decided to show to them the basic facts of our home countries(Turkey, Spain, Italy and Switzerland) like cities, food, flags and language.

We prepared a presentation to take their attention via Prezi Presentation’s interactive style. Also we spoke our own languages during the presentation in order to make children see the differences of sounds between Italian, Spanish,Turkish and English.- Thanks to Andreas in our group, who is able to speak those languages and translate to Polish in order for the kids to understand.

In order to make education more interesting for the kids, after showing our countries’ traditional cuisines, we have used “FlagPlates”, those are flags which are made up by local foods (you can see an example below) and we gave the chance to the pupils to match foods and countries in a playful way. They seemed satisfied and learnt something new while playing this game.

During the next activity, we gathered the children around a table and gave them our own currencies (Euro, Turkish Lira) to make them more closer to us and to break the typical “forced listener” system of the class. After showing, we have explained the heads sides of Cents -since it depends on each EuroZone states-, we gifted also EuroCents to the kids as a memory.

Then we came up with another game that we called “Guess the Language”, we have used the dice that we made and wrote the basic words of our languages and rolled it through the kids so they had a chance to see the words and learn.

As a last activity, we planned to show them our cultural dances on YouTube, but unfortunately we were not able to use the internet so we decided to come back to the old fashion style of education to keep the learning flow and in order not to lose the connection with the pupils. We asked them to teach us Polish words which we taught to them during the dice game. This was really interesting for us and the children seem to enjoy it.

The visit in the primary school was an amazing experience, especially when we received at the end of our workshop painted pictures made by the school children. Some of them even painted things, which we had showed to them during our prestentation. We are really gratefull for the joy that they shared with us.

We feel richer of emotions and that’s why we would like to have a similar experience in the future. It’s also a kind of project we would like to implement in our local communities.

Someone says that everyone should recive three hugs a day to be happy, but if it is a hug of child — we believe us — one is more than enough.