Pulling together
Start date: Jul 1, 2014,
End date: Jun 30, 2015
PROJECT
FINISHED
The State primary school at Melesse (Ille et Vilaine, Brittany, France) has 200 students aged six to eleven years.
English is taught by all the primary teachers as a foreign language to all the pupils. The aim is that all students leave school having completed level A1 of the Common European Framework of Reference. This is achieved by all the pupils, except by those who also have difficulties in French.
- It is those pupils that we want to help, and try to help them master a foreign language level, with a motivating project.
- In addition to language skills, we hope to develop cooperation within the school and outside, allowing all pupils to understand the advantages of plurilinguism, and discover other cultures in Europe (and beyond).
These two objectives overlap with the goals of our school project (Customize the course of all students to ensure their success, giving more consistency to their journey from nursery school to the end of their primary school (age eleven) and strengthening monitoring and actions for pupils with special needs).
- Finally, we would like to use the various digital tools available for students, teachers as well as all partners of our project in real-time situations.
In September 2014, we will launch an exchange project in English with various European schools, called “Pulling together”.
Pupils will be gathered together in eight houses with students aged 6 to 11 years old, with a teacher at the head of each house. Each of these houses will have its own cooperation project with one of the European schools.
We will use the eTwinning platform to contact the European schools who will work with us:
- Either on projects that they propose
- Either proposing their own projects (Ex: “Gardening”: following a plot’s life during the year, “Biodiversity”: following living beings on a plot during a year, “Printemps des poètes” : reading , composing, and sharing poetic moments, etc.)
We will use the TwinSpaces to gather and share all of the student’s work.
In order to lead this project and guarantee its success, a coordinator is essential.
The school head, who has a day off per week outside her teaching commitments to manage the school, has offered to take part in the project as coordinator. She will be in contact with her European colleagues, using English as the communication language.
Her written and spoken level of English seems to be insufficient to carry out the coordination tasks with fluent English. A 10 day training trip in London will help her improve her English skills.
Furthermore, the various methodology skills of the training programme will increase her English teaching skills so that she will be able to share them with the other teachers in the school.
The “Pulling together” project will enable each pupil in the school to develop their cooperation abilities, throughout their primary schooling years, reaching out from the class to the various European schools discovering other cultures, a digital culture, and all thanks to the “plurilinguism” approach.