Plan for the collaborative project: Heritage

Multinational Project: Heritage
Here you will find the description of the project. Keep reading.

Number of students

Between 30-50.

Tools: E-mail, pictures, videos, forums, padlet…

Pedagogical aims of the project

-          To provide students with an educational purpose to use all their language skills.

-          To opened a window to cultures and places around Europe/the world.

-          To connect education and to share ideas and point of views among teachers with similar purposes.

-          For students to communicate with people their age.

-          For students to be conscious of how far a language can take them.

-          For students to have a look into their backgrounds and see how far away they can take them.

Contents

-          Vocabulary: countries, nationalities, languages, food, beverage, family members and relationships.

-          Verbal tenses: present simple, modal verbs, past simple, past continuous among others.

-          Comparative and superlative forms of adjectives.

Outcome or expected result

By the end of the school year, students will have shared many experiences and information about their backgrounds with people from other countries and with their own classmates about what they have learnt.

            They will have become aware that our origins are usually mixed and that the concepts of nation and country are often too narrow for such broad people we are.

            As for physical results, they will have developed a whole structure of activities and summarising posters that can be presented on a platform in a way that shows their learning process and as a resource where they can go back if they need information for other projects.

            They are also going to have a network of contacts with whom they can communicate in the future.
 

Structure

-          Part 1

In this part students are going to get to know each other and their families.

After an initial contact via e-mail or through participation in some Forums in the Twinspace to get to know each other and our cities (towns, villages…), students are asked to bring pictures to class. These pictures must be recent and of many relatives, for instance grandparents, uncles, cousins, parents, siblings… After two weeks of collecting pictures, these pictures are going to be sent to the counterparts in a big collage on a padlet in Twinspace.

            The students are going to give clues to their counterparts in e-mails. And step by step, each student (this can be done in pairs or groups of 3) will have created the family tree of one student of another school. Eventually, we are going to have a forest of family trees. After we have this we are going to see how many nationalities and origins can be found in the family tree.

            The expected result is that we find many more nationalities and countries/cities of origin than the ones actually participating in the project.

(Possibility of working with Geography to locate the different nationalities that we come across and with Arts&Crafts to design a wonderful forest).

-          Part 2

We are going to create an interview and find someone to answer it. The interviewed must be someone (if possible from our families) who have lived abroad, is living abroad or was born in a different country from the one he is living in at the moment.

            After we have collected the answers, each student (or international group) is going to write an article or make a video-article with the story of the person that he or she has interviewed (or the person that the group have chosen).

            With the information we gather we are going to publish an online magazine. All together, we are going to choose possible titles for the magazine and vote the favourite one. Then, everyone is going to publish the story of these different individuals.

(Possibility of working with History teachers to analyse the geopolitical and sociological reasons those people abandoned their home countries).

-          Part 3

Now, students are going to learn about difficulties that one can come across when moving to other places.

            The activity can be introduced via role-play tasks where one is the new come (each one is given a role and has to treat the new come according to role). Then the new comes are going to explain how they felt.

             Students have to write a short play representing the first days of someone who is new in a place. Later on, they will have to represent and film the play. And the plays are shared with our international classmates.

 

-          Part 4

Finally, students are going to analyse different reasons why people would abandon their homes. Can these reasons be considered problems? All the groups participating in the project are going to create a final work where they try to raise awareness of our multicultural background and of the problems that make people live their homes. This work has to be shared in different social networks.

-          Part 5

The project has come to an end and students have to find a way to farewell their counterparts and make the most of what they have learnt.