Over the holiday, we would like you to do another task!

         (Because your other work has been so brilliant!)

This time your work is for a special book that will be printed and given to each country in October during our next project meeting, for children around the world to use.

This book will contain photo-copiable games and activities about all of the Great Europeans from each of our partner countries, and we will receive one too.

Our job is to plan the games and activities for the section about:

English ‘Great Europeans’.

YOUR TASK…

Please could you think of one good activity e.g. a wordsearch, crossword, quiz, game, colouring picture, maze, puzzle etc. which children in other countries would enjoy doing.

(It needs to be photo-copiable so not too colourful!)

The theme will be ONE of our great Europeans so EITHER

The Beatles, J.K.Rowling (and Harry Potter) or Florence Nightingale.

The work needs to be hand – made / drawn by you.

(You can use a computer but it must be your work.) 

The teachers will put all of the work together at the end of the first full week back in school and choose 3 for each of our Europeans.

The 3 best pieces of work for each European can then be scanned and emailed to our Polish partners who will make the special book.

(The rest will be used and displayed in school!)

Have fun, have a lovely holiday and we look forward to some great work!

First photos from Turkey on PhotoPeach

I’ll try to get lots more on when I’ve sorted out photopeach!

The children!

The Partners!

Dear Parents, children, staff and friends…

Mrs. Shotton, Mrs. Cassidy, Mrs. Whittaker, Mrs. Hogan and I have now returned from a wonderful and very productive Comenius Project meeting in Aksaray, Turkey.   

We will soon be telling you about the meeting and the exciting opportunities for the school over the remaining period of the project.

Some photos will be going on the Comenius Blog later and there will be more to follow.

The delay in our return due to the Icelandic volcano has been very unfortunate, but Miss Gibson has kept me well informed during this time and I am very grateful to her and to all of our staff for the way they have supported us and ensured the smooth running of the school in our absence.

We are relieved to be home at last, and we saw a little more of the world by train and Eurostar!

We will all be back in school as normal tomorrow and the Y3 Dewa trip will go ahead as planned.

Thank you for all of your support and kind comments.

Mr Hewer.

Next week Mr Hewer, Mrs Shotton, Mrs Cassidy, Mrs Whittaker and Mrs Hogan will be visiting our partners in Turkey for the next Comenius meeting. 

The school website link is on the side of this page – look for: NECİP-MÜNİRE ÖNEMLİ İLKÖĞRETİM OKULU Turkey

We will attend project meetings, visit the school and watch lessons, and soak up some of the culture of this fascinating country! 

We are taking with us our 2 board games designed by members of Y6 – The Railway and Mind Twizzler. 

Thank you to all of Y6 who did a great job designing the games, they were all fantastic and will all be played by children from our school. 

 We chose 2 games to take to the partners rather than one as we thought it would help them to aim the games at the differing ages of children involved in the project – some of the schools have children the same age as those in our secondary schools. 

Well done to the WHOLE SCHOOL for researching the questions – I hope you have enjoyed trying to answer them and now know a bit more about our own europeans!

In addition to the game, we are also taking our dvd – we have enjoyed watching the spanish, turkish and polish dvds and now it is their turn to see our efforts!

Well done to the SCHOOL COUNCIL for their efforts and planning for the DVD – our new stars of the small screen!!

Well done again to the WHOLE SCHOOL for your contributions – we had some great ideas including some wonderful dancing, (and some less wonderful…) lovely smiles and a super idea from Y5 who learned to say hello in the languages of all our partner countries!

Thank you to Mr Rowlands who made our DVD look really posh!

Please thank your teachers for digging out all those dodgy photos of you to put at the end of the DVD… They were fantastic!!

I’ll also be telling the partners about the great work you did for our hall – the displays look really good, and everyone has worked hard finding out facts about our partner countries and their great europeans.

So… you’ve been busy, now it’s our turn!  We’ll be telling you all about what is happening next upon our return, we will come to your classes this time as this worked so well last time, rather than holding an assembly, and give you chance to ask lots of questions about the school in Turkey, the project and any of our partner countries.

We hope to get on the blog this week…  If not then we will certainly add some photos next weekend, and we will be in close contact with school in other ways.

Have a great week, work hard and play nicely!!

Please remember:

• The co-ordinating school in Poland have now set up a website which will be added to as the project progresses.  This is based on the theme ‘Great Europeans from my country’ and you can look at pictures of the partner schools as well and read a little bit about them, and their great Europeans.  This website can be found at:

www.greateuropeans.eu

I’ll be putting some information on here later this week, but a bit of news is that I have heard from our friend Rita in Portugal who has, with her pupils, created a blog about famous europeans. It can be found at:

http://grandeseuropeus.blogspot.com/

It is in Portuguese, but you can translate using the google translate bar at the top.

They would be delighted if you would have a look and leave a comment, so please try at home (we’re not able to access the site in school, which is a shame!) The english European one of the students has written about is William Shakespeare – see if you can find the page, translate it and learn something, then leave a comment!

Today the children in Y3 watched the DVD about their friends in Spain, and read the book the Spanish children have made for them. Y6 watched the DVD from Turkey, and have been looking at the Portuguese book, Y4 have been finding out about Denmark…

On Tuesday the whole school came into an assembly to find out more about Denmark, Mrs. Brankin and Miss Newham have been sharing all our news with the younger children and Mr Hewer and Mrs Shotton are spending time with the junior classes to allow them to ask questions and find out lots more.

There is plenty more to come, the teachers have all now been given contact details for the schools they will be getting in touch with in the first instance… which are:
Y5 and Y6 will be communicating with our Portuguese and Turkish friends,
Y3 and Y4 will be getting in touch with the children in Poland and Bulgaria,
Y2 and Y1 will be contacting the Danish school,
and our Nursery and Reception children will be sharing pictures and questions with our friends in Spain.

We hope to find out lots of new things about the children and our varied lifestyles, please help your children to think of things they might like to find out when they ‘speak’ to their new friends!
More information will be coming home next week, along with a simple task for the Comenius project which we would like all the children to carry out as their homework. (Details to follow)
The children are looking forward to watching the other school’s DVDs, we have 3 so far, and reading the books, which have been beautifully made and once the children have read them they will go downstairs with the Comenius display.

More pictures are now on the Y3 blog.

Follow the links to the school’s own websites, or look at the new Comenius website showing details of all the schools and the aims of the project at www.greateuropeans.eu

Don’t forget, if you would like to see this information written in a different language, just go to the google translate bar on the side of the page!

Mr Hewer, Mrs Shotton, Mrs Brankin and Miss Newham have had the fantastic opportunity to visit the wonderful country Denmark. We had a fantastic time, meeting up with friends that we made in Poland and of course meeting new members of the project. The week flew by there was so much to see and learn about the culture and country. Where do I start? We arrived Sunday evening after a full day of travelling to be met by by the Head Teacher from the Danish school in Bronderslev to be taken to a hotel which can be seen in the pictures below. The following day we spent in school (Sondergades), where we experienced lessons in Danish about their chosen famous European ‘Hans Christian Anderson’. The children were well behaved, one of the obvious things we noticed was the small class sizes however there were no Teaching Assistants. The country had an unprecedented amount of snow… like us but they seemed to be able to cope a lot better. The snow ploughs ensure the pavements and roads are clear so people can get on with their usual day. We had a guided tour of the school where we were able to make comparisons of similarities and differences to Green Park. We had a chance to meet up with the 6 other countries to discuss developments in the program. We were very lucky as we had a day trip to the most northern tip of Denmark where we had a cold walk along a beach in nothern Jutland ‘Skagen’ where we saw seals and when we stood in the sea we were actually standing in two oceans – very clever!! The tour continued where we saw scenes from the famous Skagen artists.  We were taken to ‘Lonstrup’ an area where the cliffs were eroding an incredible 5 to 10 metres a year and summer houses and a church were in trouble of going over the cliff edge. A very kind teacher ‘Lars’ from the Danish school invited us all back to his home for afternoon tea and to meet his family. The Danish people we met were warm and generous it was a pleasure to meet them.  Anyway…there’s so much more to tell you but you’ll see in the assembly next week so have a look at our best bits!

On the Friday before last. Mr Hewer and Mrs Shotton led a special assembly with George Howarth MP, governors of the school and the reporter and photographer from the Maghull Champion, and of course all the children and staff!

We looked at how the Comenius project is taking shape, and what is next on the agenda.

The children did really well to recognise all the flags of the different countries, and learned lots about the school and areas we visited in Poland. The presentation can be found on the school system and Mr Rafferty is going to try to put a version of it on here too, so that the children can have a proper look at another time.

The main points of the assembly were..
-To give more information about the trip to meet the partners in Poland and to share pictures of them and our time in Poland.

-To tell the children which of their suggestions for our famous British Europeans had been successful… and these were
The Beatles, J.K.Rowling and Florence Nightingale.

-To tell the children about the next step in the project.
In January there will be a group of staff from Green Park heading to our next partner country, Denmark. We need to take some things with us…
A DVD of our school, which we are busy compiling at the moment, and
A piece of work to introduce the children from each partner school to our classes and give one contact email address for each class and details of how to link to our website.
Hopefully we will get lots of messages from our new friends in this way, and it will be lovely and safe because we will only be receiving and sending mail through one class address.

We appeared in the Maghull Champion last week, and we will be sending a copy of this press release to the British Council, who are delighted with what we have achieved so far.

Watch this space – I’ll try and get some nice pictures on, and we had better start learning a little Danish to help with the next trip!!

It has been a busy, fun and hard working week for us in Poland.
We had a very long journey home – partly due to a missed flight – whoops, wasn’t our fault!! After an eventful 24 hours, though, we are here.

Here are a few photos of our time in Poland, some from the wonderful school that we visited, with staff and children as nice as those as Green Park – we didn’t think that was possible!
Some of the photos are of our teacher partners, and there might even be one or two trips out, unusual trains and us doing a little bit of teaching ourselves!

The partners loved the books you made for them, and they were so impressed that they have made some future plans as a result of them… We’ll tell you more soon!

We will be talking to you all very soon and showing you lots more photos in the next couple of weeks, but these are just a few to be going along with!

Mr Hewer and Mrs Shotton in Poland, October 2009 on PhotoPeach