North and South: Building Bridges with languages.com: 30th OCTOBER 2013

Today we were asked to write an article about the Comenius Programme for the school newspaper The Crisol. The teachers gave us a few web pages from which we could find plenty of information.

We learnt a lot of things about the Programme and how it works, not only in Spain, but also in the rest of Europe. The teachers chose the best article and published it in the newspaper. Our classmate Ana Sampedro was the writer. Congratulations, Ana!

You can read it here:

OUR COMENIUS PROGRAMME:

NORTH AND SOUTH: BUILDING BRIDGES WITH LANGUAGES.COM

This is a programme financed by the European Union: two different schools give their students the opportunity to practice their foreign language skills and acquaint themselves with the language of a partner country.

The title of our school project is: “ North and South: Building Bridges with languages.com” and it is a bilateral project between our school and “Marne College”, a secondary school situated in a town called Bolsward, in The Netherlands

Students involved in a bilateral partnership are expected to learn at least the basics of the language used in a partner institution so we are going to learn a bit of Dutch. To communicate between us we will use English.

During the project, students and teachers in both countries work together on a common theme and produce a joint end product. Each participating institution must carry out a class exchange with its partner institution of a duration of minimum 10 days each. During the class exchanges, students work together at school and are hosted in each other’s families. The cooperation should not only be limited to the exchanges, but also the activities should cover the whole project period. School partnerships help pupils and teachers to acquire and improve skills not only in the topic or subject area on which the project is focused, but also in terms of teamwork, social relations, planning and undertaking project activities and using information and communication technologies.

I think that this project will give us not only the opportunity to improve our English, but also the possibility of advancing a step towards our maturity as individuals. The stay of 10 days away from our families will help us to be more mature. And of course we should be proud because we rarely have these opportunities in life, and it is amazing the possibility of establishing a friendship with a person from another country. In short, it will be a fun experience and above all we must acknowledge the enormous effort made by our teachers to have the opportunity to participate in this exchange. And it is also amazing that all the bilingual students from the 4^th year can go without looking at economic problems, because it is going to be completely free.

Ana Sampedro