Writing the story - Step 3 - Voting the European value we wish to work on

Students vote the better message!
The voting ends two weeks from today, on the 2nd of March 2009.

FRIENDSHIP - Step 2

A true friend is somebody who will not betray you, whom you have enough time to know, and to whom you tell your secrets and your thoughts. Friendship means sharing, a feeling that accompanies us through life, makes us feel united, and does not have borders closed in your heart. Having many friends is important – friends who respect you, are true to you, and don’t abandon you in times of need. Friendship is a thing that is indispensable in everybody’s life because it can help you in difficult moments.

This is is why we think FRIENDSHIP is an important message to send to the world.

Writing the Story - Step 2 - Why TOLERANCE is an important message to send to the world

This is the part where students tell their peers why theirs is an important message to send to the world.
The Romanian team has come up with this:

Tolerance means putting up with differences. It means showing respect for the race, age, gender, religion, opinions and ideas of other people.
Tolerance can be shown in many ways. A person might fully disagree with others on issues such as religion, while at the same time respecting those with different opinions and treating them with dignity and respect.
Tolerance does not mean that a person has to accept words, actions or ideas that are against her or his values or beliefs. It simply means that each person agrees to respect the other's right to her or his own feelings on the matter. When both parties have expressed their opinions, and it is obvious that neither is likely to change position, agreeing to disagree is often the most amicable outcome.
Some degree of tolerance is necessary in any civilised society, but it is not realistic to believe that all people can achieve complete tolerance on every issue. It goes against human nature, or the instinctive impulse of some, to pull away from people or things that are different or unknown. Tolerance is a learned attribute, a virtue, which requires honest effort on the part of every person. It takes time to develop tolerance, and it also takes commitment.
In its Declaration on the Principles of Tolerance (16 November 1995), UNESCO offers a definition of tolerance that most closely matches our use of the word:
"Tolerance is respect, acceptance and appreciation of the rich diversity of our world's cultures, our forms of expression and ways of being human. [...] Tolerance is harmony in difference."

Learning Italian

In order to encourage the learning of Italian, seen as key competence number 2 in the Recommendation 2006/962/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 18 December 2006 on key competences for lifelong learning, Official Journal L 394/10 of 30.12.2006, the Romanian team are assisted by a native speaker of Italian. His name is Francesco Testa and he has been in the school for a month now already.


He is a Comenius Assistant who, in addition to teaching his mother tongue in 7 special language classes every week for 5 months, takes part in ICT, Music, Art and Sport classes and thus integrate a language element into these classes.

Tolerance

This is the value the Romanian team would like to work with: TOLERANCE.
Here is the message the Romanian team would like to send to the world: 'I may not know their names or their family, but all the children I see are important just like me'.

Writing the Story - Step 1 - This is the message that we want to send to the world

Writing a story in English is a very productive and exciting way to learn the language. At pre-intermediate and intermediate levels (Independent User on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages), producing a narrative is an ideal way to bring together the skills of grammar, reading and writing. It can give the English teachers a chance to teach new vocabulary by modelling enthusiasm for and curiosity about new words through their own behaviour and attitudes. The two enthusiastic teachers of English in the partner schools have already been looking for 'teachable moments' throughout the day for the past month, pointing out interesting words as they work on texts, asking students to explore alternative ways of expressing concepts, helping identify colourful, descriptive ways of writing.
The 'Guided activity' that is about to start these days has got 15 steps.
Step number 1: We will need to choose one European value (out of the 12 mentioned beforehand) as that value will be the one we will work with - it is to be turned into 'The Message that We Want to Send to the World'. The two teams will need to decide on a common value.
The Italian team has been thinking about FRIENDSHIP - and the MESSAGE: Good friends warm the heart.

2009 - The European Year of Creativity and Innovation through Education and Culture

As the year 2009 has been declared The European Year of Creativity and Innovation through Education and Culture, we aim at awakening and reinforcing creativity and innovation in our youngest students, aged 12-13, through drama, seen as a creative activity involving movement, language, imagination, emotion, and social interaction to represent a story.
Writing, rehearsing, performing and recording the play in both Italian and Romanian will raise our students' confidence in expressing themselves, expand their knowledge of the world, teach them social skills and develop their communication skills. This creative learning will take place as a result of creative teaching, which is to be accomplished in our schools through the activities of this project too.
The aim of the 2009 European Year of Creativity and Innovation through Education and Culture is to promote creativity as a driver for innovation - all forms of innovations, including non-technological. Providing an environment which stimulates aesthetic sensitivity, emotional development and intuition can foster creativity as a competence, transferable to a variety of contexts. The various forms of cultural, artistic and creative self-expression inside formal education will hopefully encourage openness to cultural diversity as a means of fostering intercultural communication and artistic cross-fertilisation in the future.

We are currently working on the questionnaire for evaluating our students' satisfaction concerning awareness of European citizenship. Here are the 9 questions:
1 Think of somebody you know who lives in a foreign country. What is her/his name and where does she/he live (name of country and town/village)?
2 Is she/he interested in: (tick) sport, reading, films, computer games, fashion, music? (add any other, if necessary)
3 Does she/he live in a town or in a village? (tick)
4 Does she/he live in a house or in an apartment? (tick)
5 What do you know about the school she/he attends? (when she/he goes to school, holidays, subjects at school etc.)
6 What do you know about the place where she/he lives? (language, climate, famous landmarks, personalities, exports, football teams etc.)
7 What do you know about the customs in her/his region? (music, food, jobs etc.)
8 How do you communicate with her/him?
9 Write down two things that you have in common and two things that are different in your ways of life.
About half the students involved in the project have already handed in the completed questionnaires. Here is Ana-Maria C.'s questionnaire:

Here is Marek's questionnaire:

Our Goals

The main goals of our partnership are:
- to promote enhanced awareness of a different European culture (Italian and Romanian respectively);
- to learn Italian and Romanian, at elementary level;
- to acknowledge common roots;
- to compare traditions and values;
- to set the students in various situations of speaking, writing, learning, working;
- to use the Information and Communication Technologies for preparing the class exchanges, for exchanging ideas throughout the life of the project and for evaluating and disseminating the results of the project.
The main subject we are addressing in our partnership is European Citizenship. Making use of materials prepared in English, our students have learnt and will continue learning about citizenship, they have become aware of their rights and also their responsibilities, and they will develop life skills and competences such as participation and independence of learning.
European Citizenship is about learning and working with other people with whom we as European citizens already have, or are trying to reach, shared understanding of the values we believe in: friendship, peace, freedom, human rights, tolerance, responsibility, participation, partnership, solidarity, human dignity, access, equality.

Set sail!

Welcome to the blog of our YELLOW project! YELLOW stands for Young European Illustrators of Knowledge.
This is a project within the frame of the Lifelong Learning Programme of the European Union. The two partners are Colegiul National Gheorghe Lazar in Sibiu, Romania and Istituto Comprensivo Statale in Resana, Italy.
Here is a short presentation of the Romanian school:

Here is a short presentation of the Italian school:

Our project aims at improving our students' ability to communicate in foreign languages by motivating them to build on knowledge already possessed (English) and to acquire initial competence (Italian and Romanian respectively).
Our project is cross-curricular, involving students and teachers in several areas of study: Languages, Information and Communication Technologies, Civics, Arts and Crafts, Music, Sport and Geography.
The two main end products will be a bilingual illustrated dictionary of European values and a play, having at its core one European value, in Italian and Romanian - scripts and shows. 20 Romanian and Italian students, accompanied by teachers, will participate in class exchanges, with the purpose of giving them the opportunity of working intensively together on the project.