Tuesday, December 30, 2008

News by Kalina- BULGARIA


We – the children and teachers from 2b, 3v, 4g and 4d grades from VRATSA- BULGARIA - introduce our country through our answers to your questions (short summary by admin)


The national flag of Bulgaria consists of three horizontally lined colours – white, green and red. White is symbol of purity, peace and hope. Green symbolizes freedom, faith, nature, fertility. Red – courage, love, the blood of heroes.

The motto of our town is “Vratsa – a town like the Balkan – ancient and young.” The monument of the Herald – a Russian soldier, who playing a bugle announced the liberation of our town. The poet revolutionary Hristo Botev was killed at the peak of Okolchitsa, near out town. The Meschii tower in the central town square is a medieval tower which dates back from the 16th century. There is an ethnographic and revival period complex in the town. It is named after St. Sofronii Vrachanski, the patron of our school. The House of tourists built in 1926 with the voluntary work of tourists from Vratsa is on a hill above our town.
The old Bulgarian capitals Pliska, Preslav, Veliko Tarnovo are connected with our history. They keep the memory of past distant times and memorable events. There are monuments erected in the towns of Pleven and at Shipka peak connected with the Russian-Turkish war of liberation.

Bulgaria is a piece of heaven. Our country is more that 1300 years old. It has rich past and cultural heritage. We are proud of having unique nature – high mountains, cool forests, crystal clear lakes, mineral springs, lovely Black sea, attractive to us and the foreigners resorts, monasteries, natural formations. Our people are hard-working and hospitable.

We love our customs, the traditional holidays, the folk dances and songs, the legends, connected with historical and geographical places of interest.

The most traditional songs for Bulgaria are the folk songs. Our country is divided into seven folklore districts and each has its specific songs. The region of Vratsa belongs to the Northern folklore district. Our songs are characterized with unequal rhythms and impress the music fans all over the world. A Bulgarian song is recorded and sent to space with the spaceship Voyager in the 1970s.

Our traditions are mostly connected to the Christian faith – for Easter we colour eggs, on St. Nikola’s day we eat fish, and on Chritmas – we eat banitsa (pastry with cheese and eggs) with lucky charms. We also celebrate Sty. Lazar’s day when little lasses dance in the house yards for health and fertility. We make survachki (as the ones we sent you) for patting our backs for health on the New Year’s Day. Our mummers (kukeri) dances are very interesting too. They are danced by young men who wear mask to scare away evil.

Our folklore garments consist of a long white gown with embroidered sleeves, typical trousers for the men (poturi), waistcoat, red wide textile belt, and a fur hat (kalpak); for the women – skirt ot sleeveless dress, apron, peabold stockings, kerchief and flowers for the head. People used to put on pig skin shoes. The typical colours of the folklore garment are red, white, blue, black and green

We eat various foods in our country but we, the children mostly like chips, banitsa, soup, beans, pizza, spaghetti, doner, baklava, cakes although we know that vegetables, fruit and dairy products are best and healthiest for us. We have typical dishes eaten on traditional holidays. They are vegetarian stuffer peppers and cabbage leaves on Christmas eve, kapama and sore cabbage dishes for the New Year’s Eve, fish for St. Nikola’s day, banitsa and halva on the first Sunday before Lent, kozunak for Easter, lamb meat for St. Georgi’s day.

The typical foods we eat are banitsa, soup, musaka, beans, lentils, peas, hand-made bread with cheese, kosunak (sweet Easter bread with raisins).

Our school has a 100-year history. There are children from 1st to 4th grade to study in it. It has two floors and large light rooms. We have a music and arts studies, two computer rooms and a gym.
We start studying English from the 2nd grade – at the beginning twice a week, and in 3rd and 4th grade – three times a week.
All the children at the school study English, a child attends Spanish language training; there are children with little knowledge of Italian and German.
We are not taught musical instruments and we don’t play any at school. We have a classmate who studies the Bulgarian folk instrument kaval. We have facultative study of maths, athletics, art, choir, folk dances. Our compulsory subjects are – Bulgarian language and literature, maths, man and society, man and nature, music, art, English, sports and technology.
Sometimes our curriculum is easy, sometimes difficult. We have five or six lessons a day.
We start our compulsory education at the age of 6 with a preparatory class and then start school at 7. Primary education includes 1-4 grades, secondary – 5-8 and high school is afterwards until 12th grade. Then the good and ambitious adolescents study at universities and pass hard exams.

Monday, December 29, 2008




CLASSES' E-MAIL BOXES




Thursday, December 25, 2008

QUESTIONNAIRE FOR STUDENTS

1) Have you ever been to another country? YES NO

2) If yes, where?

3) What did you like most?

4) Have you got any friends of other nationalities? YES NO

5) If yes, are you interested in their culture? YES NO

6) Do you think it’s important to know other cultures? YES NO

7) Why?

8) Have you ever talked at school about traditions and cultures of other countries?
YES NO
9) How do you think it’s possible to know a different culture?
Project activities we intend to carry out in the course of the school year 2008/2009

HOW TO INTRODUCE THE TOPIC:
• Brainstorming about the topic;
• Questionnaires for students and for parents to use throughout the project to evaluate its impact.
• (It’s important to translate the answers and send the results to the co-ordinator that will spread the results, in order to compare the different cultures);
• Logo Competition: Invention of the LOGO of the project (a picture or a symbol that represents the most relevant aspects of the project):the students will be asked to draw a symbol, then the teachers of every school will choose and send the most meaningful to the coordinating school that finally will choose the best one among the four pictures coming from the different partner schools.
MUTUAL KNOWLEDGE:
• Reciprocal knowledge activities: the students of every partner school will introduce themselves, their own town and school through photos/drawings/texts/videos….
• These products will be exchanged among the partner schools.
• Start pen friends: it would be interesting and motivating for the children to start corresponding with their partners by e-mail and/or ordinary mail.
PROJECT ACTIVITIES:
• during the meeting we should choose among the following activities, those we intend to carry out during the first year. Then we have to think about methodologies, instruments, times …
• Elaboration of cross-curricular teaching units in order to involve the teachers of the different areas in the development of the project activities;
• collect and exchange: traditional stories, lullabies, chants and so on (younger children);
• collect and exchange: legends, tales about the creation of the world, passages about daily life, historical or contemporary passages about our system of social and professional organization. (older students).
• Creation of a website to display the project results, report on the work, its progress, chat on forum.
• Creation of a notice board about the project inside each school.
• Involvement of the school staff: monitoring the number of immigrant students in our schools and their origin, and/or the number of emigrant students and their destinations; list and compare the “instruments” each institution has already created to make the integration of the foreign students easier
• Plan “listening time” activities: parents/grandparents and/or people coming from other countries tell stories belonging to their own culture; compare, without discriminating, the different values found in the texts/stories read and listened
• Stimulate students’ creativity through the creation of intercultural tales, mixing words and contents inspired by texts of different origins
• Plan some teaching units about cinema: significant movies can let our children know each country’s way of living in a more real way
• Comenius “Inter-Cool-Ture Day”: final meeting, held in each institute, with all the students involved in the project.

RULES FOR A GOOD PARTNERSHIP:

to establish common rules about the partnership communication:
vehicular language (English), type of communication (by e-mail and/or by telephone, by fax, by letter), frequency of communication (weekly or more intense according to our needs), quality of communication (each message sent to every partner to ensure each one’s full involvement in every project decision);

to share the most suitable itineraries for the topic of each year;

to exchange products, results, data…

to decide together the criteria for the project evaluation.

FOR THE VISIBILITY OF THE PROJECT:

to insert it in each institute activity plan, integrating it with the main values and aims on which the culture of democracy is based (European citizenship, inter-culturality, respect for the children’s rights).Moreover the project will have a cross-curricular aspect and will be integrated in the regular didactic activities

to plan school meetings to illustrate the project activities and/or show some of the products, to parents and to all the teachers of each partner school.

Each partner school will have to establish a “cultural exchanges commission”, share responsibilities, distribute tasks and plan recurrent meetings useful to evaluate the activities.
FOR THE DIFFUSION OF THE EXPERIENCE :

to create “project corners” inside the schools showing most of the materials produced and exchanged between the partners;

to plan a didactic exhibition with all the products obtained;

to produce: cd-rom, audio and videotapes, photos, books, questionnaires, web pages on the schools’ websites.

to publish articles on local and national newspapers about the main events of the project (project meetings…).

FOR THE IMPACT ON THE WIDER COMMUNITY :

to organise a “project day”(at the end of the school year) involving all the children and teachers of each school, during which they will share their experiences working together; it will represent the conclusion of the activities for the first year. At the end of the Day we’ll give the children a certificate of participation in the Project.

TO MONITOR PARENTS AND CHILDREN’S APPROVAL about the whole project development:

at the end of the school year we should propose them a final evaluation questionnaire, whose results let us know their level of satisfaction about the activities of the project.
(The project meeting in Poland will represent the chance to decide together the criteria and the means for the project evaluation.)

TO IMPROVE THE CHILDREN AND TEACHER’S KNOWLEDGE OF THE ICT, through the direct usage of:

PC to communicate with partners and to document works ( writing texts and inserting images, using software such as Power Point, creating hypertexts looking for information in Internet...);
Camera to take photos;
Video camera to film objects, places, people…

PROJECT SUMMARY
In our complex modern society it’s necessary to bring up children to meet and discover the differences and similarities typical of reality. To reflect upon diversity let them overcome superficial judgements and get used to comparison, it contributes to create a positive atmosphere where each one can feel accepted and can express himself/herself at his/her best. It’s important to create occasions to let children reflect, face each other and talk about these topics, aiming at promoting every day the education to life in common and to peace, meant as: research of solidarity attitudes, learning through experience and comparison, research of solutions to conflicts. In order to plan interculture, it’s important to have a strong identity and to show sense of responsibility; with this deep motivation school becomes a place where it’s possible to learn to make interculture, giving value to history and research, improving analysis and invention, accepting and recognizing other people, creating the premises for a culture of tolerance, stopping the cultural homogenization and making diversity a real treasure, a new educational paradigm.
SCHOOLS involved:

ISTITUTO COMPRENSIVO STATALE "G. BINOTTI"
Viale Martiri della Libertà 12 Pergola (PU) ITALY
tel 0039 0721734322- fax 0039 0721734322
email: ic.pergola@provincia.ps.it
http://scuole.provincia.ps.it/ic.pergola

ISTITUTO COMPRENSIVO STATALE “D. Alighieri”
ad Indirizzo Musicale
Via Pietro Nenni, s.n. - 61047 SAN LORENZO IN CAMPO (PU)
tel 0039 0721774076 – Fax 0039 0721776817
email:
ic.sanlorenzo@provincia.ps.it ; http://icsanlorenzoincampo.it – http://scuole.provincia.ps.it/ic.sanlorenzo


Nachalno uchilishte “Sv. Sofronii Vrachanski”
Ul. Stoyan Kyaluchev 2 - Vratsa - BULGARIA
Tel: 359 92656665 – 359888567847
e-mail: sofronii@m-real.net

Druga osnovna sola Slovenj Gradec
Kopaliska, 29 – 2380 – Slovenj Gradec - SLOVENIA
www.druga-os-sg.si
e-mail: group1.ossgii@guest.arnes.si

Casa dei Bambini S.A.
Carter Bellpuig 8-10 – 17007 – Girona - SPAIN
www.bambini-montjuic.com
e-mail: bambini_comenius@hotmail.com

Gazi Ilkogretim Okulu
Deniz Abdal Mh. Necip Asim Sk. 29 – Capa / Fatih
34080 – Istanbul – TURKEY
www.fatihgazi.com
e-mail:fatihgazi@hotmail.com

Agrupamento de Escolas de Samora Correia – ESCOLA BASICA
DOS 2° E 3° CICLOS PROF. JOAO FERNANDES PRATAS
Bairro das Acacias – 2135-236 Samora Correia – Lisboa - Portugal
www.a-e-s-c.info
e-mail : info@eps-prof-j-fernandes-pratas.rcts.pt