Visibility of eTwinning Projects Groups July 2019 Newsletter Newsletter 9 | Page 103

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2019 Newsletter
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absolutely hilarious. It proved to be so effective at
engaging students in this creative writing exercise
that in our school 7 classes wrote amazing stories
and came up with ‘magical’ words on their own,
gave them to other teams to make their stories
more challenging. Since it was such a success, we
decided to broaden our trading card selection to
include recipes, personalities, places from any
country the students preferred. They would also be
able to create trading cards for vocabulary phrases,
inventions, characters and even pets. Now our
stories should really be a thing of magic.
But why stop here. Creative writing can be done in
so many ways and it is obviously more fun when
you are trying to make sense of things that don’t
necessarily make sense and convince others your
story is the absolute truth. This is what we did
when our students first met their partners, in March
2019, at Botosani.
We got everybody out of their comfort zone,
especially the teachers, and asked a former
student, with years of eTwinning under his hat, to
help us create teams, transnational, mixed,
teachers, students. Then each team drew a title or
a list of 20 completely random words and started
making history. From Jijou the time machine and
the black hole, to a new sport of the future,
volleyball with peanuts, a human adopted by a
family of aliens, the friendship between a mammoth
and a comet, the story of a new constellation, a
family of Yeti in search of proof humans were real
(which they of course found in Botoșani), secret
talents and super powers, a dragon who could
transform his stories into reality through music, all
the teams came forward and amazed us with their
wild ideas and sense of humour. There were
mistakes but nobody cared about those. We all
cared about the fun, the learning, the confidence,
the bonding, the desire to do more and cooperate,
innovate. And to make things even simpler, we
created Auras for each story, making the videos
available with a simple scan.
Our creative endeavours did not stop there. We
could not skip the chain stories. This time different
mixed teams were tasked with starting a story,
ending it with a half-finished sentence, then
spending 5 minutes continuing the stories the other
teams were writing. Spaceships and kittens,
mysteries and aliens, the stories were even
illustrated, and the students’ enthusiasm was
obvious in the way they were frantically moving
from story to story, reading, debating, writing,
checking, moving to the next one.
The end of the short exchange of students was in
sight, tears were running freely, and friendships
had been forged in the fires of creative writing and
learning together. Promises were made and new
ideas were starting to form.
At the end of May, different groups of students met
again, this time in Poland (the Romanian students
had the chance to see the Polish friends that had
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