What matters in your life?: 2016

Wednesday 10 August 2016

Posting our favourite songs as good-bye gifts for our project partners. Worksheets to be used in the future by teachers and their students during English classes

Our final task was to post our beloved songs as farewell presents for our project partners. Below there are some of them :)

And here it the link to the worksheets which can be used during English classes to develop students' speaking skills:

Worksheets

Here is the text of the agreed project manifesto:

"We love our families, friends, homelands, their traditions and culture.
We believe in universal values such as love, peace, tolerance, solidarity and co-operation. We can't think only about ourselves, we want to be opened for others. We are convinced that all young people should take care of other humans and the environment.
We are committed to all the values we believe in and the goals we want to achieve in life.
Let's begin the new age of international collaboration and peaceful co-existance! Let's make the world a bit better!"

Here are the results of the project evaluation

Online magazines - The Philippines, Greece and Italy

Here are the three magazines about the Philippines, Greece and Italy :)

Friday 17 June 2016

Here is the online magazine putting together all the materials from

"Our passions" task.

Enjoy reading!

Let's play a Kahoot quiz about our project :)

We created a Kahoot quiz and played it with several groups.

Now the quiz is available and other teams and individual students

can play it as well. It's a great fun! :)

And the students from other countries also played the quiz :)

Wednesday 15 June 2016

Dozens of entries about the participants' passions have appeared on our FB site recently. It was so interesting to read about all your interests, hobbies and things that make your life more colourful :)

Thursday 9 June 2016

"What matters in your life?" popularised on the website of the Copernicus Upper-Secondary School in Tarnobrzeg, Poland

Today a short article covering the issues we've been working on

and a photo gallery has appeared on the website of the school.

The article about the project

The photo gallery

We have just started working on the project manifesto.

The participants learnt what should be included in such a composition.

Interview with the finalist of the Global Teacher Prize - Jolanta Okuniewska

Jolanta grew up and trained to be a teacher in communist Poland. At that time there were few chances to collaborate with other teachers internationally, so when the Iron Curtain fell in 1990 she eagerly embraced the new opportunities available. She began to learn English to work with other schools in Europe and explore new teaching styles.
Her major innovation has been to implement tablets in her primary school classes to enhance learning through online puzzles, games and posters that she developed with a colleague, in addition to using free Polish and English e-learning resources. She used ICT to allow a chronically ill pupil to follow lessons and stay in touch with her class despite having to spend a lot of time in hospital. Jolanta makes extensive use of eTwinning projects so that her students develop a broad range of collaborative, linguistic, intercultural and technical competencies.
Last year her class occupied first place in the school ranking of educational achievements and won several prizes. Jolanta herself has received several awards, including the Commission of National Education Medal and the 2012 Award of the Minister of Education.
She shares lessons with other teachers throughout Europe, and trains Polish teachers at conferences, online and in publications on integrating ICT into lessons and setting up eTwinning projects.

1. What matters in your life?

Most of all, agreement with myself and peaceful co-existence. I appreciate peace and taking actions which are in accord with my conscience and don’t harm others, and I am able to help them.
I like inspiring others, giving people clues and observing how they develop. I don’t like imposing or being in the centre of attention. The most important values for me are my family, love and friendship.

2. What mattered to you when you were a teenager?
When I was a teenager I loved learning. I was lucky to meet teachers who carried out interesting classes or were people with a great personality. And thanks to that even Physics, which wasn’t my favourite, became more interesting.
I used to read a lot. Brand new books from the district library were always my first choice. That was my privilege.

3. What are your passions?
Teaching is my passion. I feel best in the classroom. Little children give me a lot of energy and love and they are devoted friends. We treat each other with respect, trust each other and these are the basis I’ve been building my school relations on. Butterflies are also my passion. Observing and taking pictures of these colourful insects is an absorbing activity on holidays. I collect notebooks from all over the world. I have got over eighty now.

Monday 30 May 2016

Some other ISSUU magazines

Some other ISSUU magazines devoted to the other participating countries have just appeared on our FB site.

Here they are :)

Tuesday 24 May 2016

Our passians matter for us

We've just kicked off our next project task. This time we talk about our passions and why they are so important for us. The first person who shared was Akansha from New Delhi :)

Helping others is the thing important for many of us

Between 16th and 21st May many students participated in a sports event in Tarnobrzeg,

our hometown. Everybody could take part in a run and each kilometre was exchanged

by the sponsors for a small amount of money (50 groszy) and donated to Patryk - a little boy

who needs a hand prothesis to live normally.

Wednesday 18 May 2016

ISSUU magazine - "What matters in your life?"

Krystian Furman gathered together all our responses from the "What matters in your life?" discussion. Here is the ISSUU magazine:

First interviews have just appeared on our FB project group

Saturday 14 May 2016

Creating project dictionary

Our next project task was to create a multilingual dictionary with all the things

that matter for us.

Below you can see the link to this dictionary.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1p_dtPWOcxa4_fldR_t_acrmbAfEXviOGZu6MT8xB0cA/edit#gid=0

Thursday 12 May 2016

Peace and tolerance matter for us

On Friday, 6th May the students from Poland took part in the unveiling of a commemorative plaque devoted to Marian Ruzamski, a local painter who died in a death camp during the Second World War. The celebrations were the final part of a project with a school from Wurzburg, Germany on the relations between Poland and Germany in the 20th century entitled "Two neighbours - one perspective".

We all believe that living in peace and having good relations with neighbouring countries is what matters to all of us.

Mother's Day

In some countries Mother's Day is celebrated on 8th May,

in other ones on 26th May.

But we all agree that our mothers matter a lot for us :)

Tuesday 26 April 2016

THE WEEK OF POLAND

Today, i.e. on 26th April we started the WEEK OF POLAND.
The participants had a chance to exchange information about this European country.

Partial results of our project survey

Here are partial results of the first part of our project survey.

54 students have taken part in it so far.

Please have a look at it :)

Partial results of the survey published on ISSUU

Monday 25 April 2016

Let's go to the Philippines this week!

Our next stop in our round-the-world trip was the Philippines.

We visited this magnificent country between 18th and 25th April.

The project survey - part I

The participants of our project took part in an opinion poll this week.

The survey was devoted to three values: education, friendship and love.

Here is the link to our poll:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZSYBY6K

The WEEK OF LITHUANIA

Between 11th and 18th April we all visited virtually Lithuania :)

It was such an amazing experience to learn so many new things about this wonderful country.

Below are some materials.

Monday 4 April 2016

THE WEEK OF VIETNAM

This week we are going to Vietnam.

Here are the things we've learnt from each other about this great country :)

Our new task - interviews with interesting people

A new task has been just announced. We are going to interview some interesting people (parents, neighbours, teachers, politicians, sportsmen, artists, etc.) on what mattered to them when they were teenagers and still matters in their life.

Below you can read an interview with a Nothern-Irish writer - Glenn Patterson my students conducted in 2009 after his visit in Poland we had taken part in.

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" How did you spend free time when you were a teenager?

The way, I suspect, teenagers everywhere spend their time. I played a lot of football, I hung around with a group of other boys - about five or six of us - trying to meet up with girls. On winter evenings we would do nothing much more than walk the streets of the housing estate where we lived, endlessly, round and round. We smoked for the entertainment value - look, it's coming out my nose! - and drank far too much and far too young. In the early summer we built a bonfire - a project that took many weeks - to be lit on the 11th of July (the night before the 12th July Orange parades). Some time in my mid to late teens this sort of thing began to matter to me less. I started hanging around with people from my school, rather than my estate.

What was important for you then?

Without wanting to be dramatic what was important to me was not ending up dead. The violence in Northern Ireland often seemed terribly random (a lot of it was terribly random) and I worried pretty much all the time that I would fall victim to its randomness. In many respects I was a very confident youth (too confident, some people would probably say), but in this one crucial respect I was nervous to the point of paranoia. Until that time I mentioned in my mid to late teens all I wanted at the end of each school day was to get back to my housing estate. I was an ardent Unionist in those days, as were the majority of people where I lived. Much more prosaically what mattered to me was (again) football, music, falling in love (I never just went out with a girl, I always fell in love), and, bit by bit as time went on, writing, although I wouldn’t want to make too much of this: lots of young people write .

What music did you listen to?

I had three older brothers who bought a lot of ‘singles’. This would have been early 1970s, Glam was very big, one brother was a big T.Rex fan, one a fan of Slade, one a fan of Bowie (although he hid his one and only Bowie LP – Aladdin Sane - from our parents, because everyone’s parents then disapproved of Bowie. I remember going hunting for that record like it was pornography: the elicit thrill of it taking it out of the cupboard where my brother had stashed it...). I bought records too, occasionally, many of which I would be embarrassed to admit to, but what the heck: the Osmonds and Cilla Black spring to mind. Again it was as I entered my later teens that my music tastes began to change. I was at school with a boy called Andy White, who is now a singer-songwriter. We swapped records – Dylan, Beatles, Doors, Velvet Underground – and gradually became aware of the music scene going on in belfast. (Or at least I gradually became aware of it. Andy was already a part of it.) By the late 70s punk had taken off here. It was a very exciting period (the Undertones, Stiff Little Fingers, Rudi), although the nervous part of me still made me wary of going into the centre of town at nights. I am currently writing a film script about that period and about a record shop/record label called Good Vibrations around which a lot of that punk scene revolved.

What were your dreams when you were a teenager?

Early teens? Simple: play for Manchester United.
Later teens, well I would blush to say... "

Here are some links to learn more about Glenn:
Interview with Glenn Patterson
Glenn's biography on the website of the British Council
Series of articles written by Glenn Patterson for The Guardians

Holi and Easter - two festivals of ours

At the end of March many of us celebrated Holi and Easter.

Holi is a spring festival, also known as the festival of colors. The festival signifies the victory of good over evil, the arrival of spring, end of winter, and for many a festive day to meet others, play and laugh, forget and forgive, and repair broken relationships, and is also celebrated as a thanksgiving for a good harvest.

Easter, also called Pascha or Resurrection Sunday, is a festival and holiday celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, described in the New Testament as having occurred on the third day of his burial after his crucifixion. It is the culmination of the Passion of Christ, proceded by Lent, a forty-day period of fasting, prayer and penance.

Wednesday 30 March 2016

Let's come back to Europe - THE WEEK OF GREECE :)

Between 28th March and 4th April we explored GREECE :)

It was an unforgettable experience to learn more about this wonderful country!

THE WEEK OF MALAYSIA

Between 20th and 27th March we went on a trip to Malaysia

by taking part in the WEEK OF MALAYSIA :)

Here are the things we learnt during that excursion :)

Still collecting questions for the project survey

We are approaching the deadline to propose questions for our project survey.

Here is the link to the online collection on PADLET:

Created with Padlet

Wednesday 9 March 2016

Our next stop - INDONESIA :)

Having visited Romania we went on a trip to INDONESIA :) The students and teachers shared so many photos, films and articles.

Collecting question for the project survey

Next we collected on PADLET questions to be used in our survey addressed to teenagers in all the participating countries.

Created with Padlet

What matters in your life? - collecting participants' opinions for the project e-book

In the meantime we started our discussion on the project topic: