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Fairytales – Fiction – Friendship
Bertie the boo..
Fairytales – Fiction – Friendship
Bertie the bookworm finds friends all over Europe
Start date: Sep 1, 2015,
End date: Aug 31, 2018
PROJECT
FINISHED
During our three year project we want to develop our pupils’ reading competence which is one of the key skills in their education. Our five primary schools in England, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain will offer their children of all age groups different creative and child-friendly methods to motivate them to read more. We want them to realize that reading is a life skill that can inspire, help develop imagination and questioning, is important but most of all fun. We will make sure that children with specific difficulties and low motivation to read will be included to enhance their chances for a successful school education.
In surveys we will find out about the pupils’ reading habits, preferences and skills. They will vote for their top books and present them to the partner schools. Bertie the Bookworm will be our project mascot. He will travel to the partner schools carrying project results and observing project work. During the whole partnership we will motivate our children to read many books, comics and magazines, talk about them and read them to each other. Pupils will make their own bookworms which will grow in length with every book they read throughout the project.
Countries will exchange traditional stories, fairytales and legends from their culture with accompanying art work and versions written by the children. We will invite authors into schools and visit printing and publishing houses. Children will study promotion strategies to gain basic knowledge and impressions about the production and sale of the books we read. Children “go back in time” interviewing adults about what they read and played with when they were children, comparing their findings with today’s childhood and putting their results in “time machines”.
Pupils will choose and present their book heroes and invent their own hero, based on their personal values and ideas. In creative and cooperative work they will put them together in fantasy stories, design costumes and props for them and play their scenes on stage. They will dress up as their hero for a show during a mobility and compete in story based sporting activities. Through these different and motivating activities our pupils will improve their own reading skills in combination with other skills such as creative writing in their mother tongue and in English, researching about project topics, using media, presenting work, producing creative artwork and drama etc.
Direct contacts between our classes, individual children and teachers via the eTwinning portal will support language learning and intercultural education. Allowing our children to work, play, communicate and visit each other will strengthen their understanding of the everyday life of children, families and schools in other EU-countries. By taking part in transnational learning activities they will experience firsthand family life and culture by staying with host families, giving the children a real life focus and purpose for their project work. The students will get into contact with different European languages and use English as the project language for communication and presentation. These transnational activities will be intensive working time and highlights in our partnership, presenting and evaluating results and celebrating success.
For our teachers we will encourage an intensive exchange of teaching methods and styles and share good practice, especially in the fields of reading and literacy, project work, creative thinking and media use. Our teachers and children will cooperate closely, plan and carry out project work together and share its results. We will involve parents, local communities and other partners. We will make progress and results visible on our project website, the regular Bertie Magazine and the eTwinning portal as well as in displays and presentations at school.
Finally we will sum up our outcome in a reading curriculum which will give guidelines and methods about how we can improve our pupils’ reading skills leading to a sustainable and high quality educational work.