Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group Newsletter 2017 No. 7 | Page 89

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2017 Newsletter
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Singing and eTwinning in the English class
by Loredana Popa
First off, I know you are thinking you have read all
this before, using songs during the English class in
order to help students learn in an attractive and
easy manner; except we are not talking about
singing only in English.
So let’s start at the beginning. September 2016,
planning to celebrate EDL via the usual means,
postcards, small sentences, a few videoconferences,
something we have been doing for years. But this
time we add a few twists: tongue twisters, in our
partners’ native languages and singing in their
languages too. You would think that is so
complicated, especially since we are talking about
4 th graders and languages that are so different from
ours, such as Polish, Slovenian, Greek, Ukrainian.
We used the TwinSpace of the project very much,
and also the YouYube account to share the videos;
in SlideShare we have a school magazine where we
wrote about the project: some pages, and also the
emails and what was up.
For adding images each of us created an album for
images, also for videos for better sharing.
However, the two 4 th grade classes at School nr. 17
Botosani kicked off a one of a kind eTwinning
project entitled Let’s celebrate EDL together with 23
partners from 10 other countries (France, Spain,
Italy, Greece, Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland, Czech
Republic, Portugal, Slovenia). We had worked on
the project for a few weeks before school started,
just brainstorming and gathering ideas and tools we
would use. We did the usual, sent and received our
cards celebrating EDL and recorded a few messages
in our language and English and posted them on
the TwinSpace.
This was a good project, and students and teachers
are extremely proud of it! At the same time, we reckoned it would be great if
all the children sang the same song, but in their
language. We all agreed on the soundtrack from a
cartoon that is popular in all the countries, Gummy
Bears, so we got to work. We each sang the version
of the song in our language and English, but some
of us were even bolder and tried singing it in a few
other languages too. It was a lot of fun, especially
during our videoconferences.
Nicoletta Hustiuc works as a primary school and
preschool teacher at Scoala Gimnaziala nr. 3 Cugir,
Grădinița cu Program Normal Vinerea – Alba,
Romania. She has been involved in eTwinning
projects since 2008. She loves working with
children and being involved in very different kinds
of projects. She participated in a Grundvid
workshop in 2014 in France and in an Erasmus+
seminar in Poland in 2016. She constantly tries to
keep in touch with teachers with similar ideas
abroad. Celebrating the International Day of Education, we
(the Romanian team) recorded messages in all the
languages, each student choosing at least 2
languages, apart from English and saying a few
things about themselves. Some parents were able
to help us, because they had been living or working
abroad, so we got help with our Greek, Czech,
Polish, Italian and Ukrainian messages.
Needless to say how happy our partners were to
receive such an amazing gift, be it virtual! What
came next was only natural – teaching our
language to our partners and learning from them
during our Videoconferences. Soon, we had
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