vineri, 26 septembrie 2008

European Day of Languages




Yes, I only found out the day before yesterday that such a day exists (since 2001) and that there is going to be some kind of a poster contest supervised by the modern languages teachers. I was a bit upset at first that I hadn't been notified in advance like other colleagues had been, but I think that in the two hours 5 kids and I took to create a poster we did a great job. We'd have liked to add some font colour or our fan but we didn't have any time left.
European language diversity was supposed to be celebrated and the only "clue" that these kids study Italian was that we wrote the title in Italian. Then I looked on the internet for how people say "hello" in all European languages and that's what kids wrote on the little stars...The other posters were beautiful, but...different because they posted photos of wonderful monuments and such of the countries they study the language of and quite frankly that would have been much easier...we'd have printed some photos too for that matter...I loved this one on the right, made by the colleagues who teach German, also the "French" ones, similar to this.

The important thing is kids had fun, I had fun and I needed it because I've got such busy days these days... They all won, of course, even though they were highly disappointed that no awards were given, I guess their little competitive sense is not so little anymore...:)
The first photo was supposed to be posted at the bottom of the entry, but oh well, I still haven't got Blogger...It's a funny pic of me and 6th graders who made the poster. We were saying "formaaaaaggiooooo", "cheese" that is in Italian.:)

As for blogging...I moved here because I like this format and because I know that the people I care for from my old blogs will come here to be updated about me...I'm done reposting, I only reposted a few entries from one "challenge" I used to participate in, "Writer's Block". I will probably miss "Picture Perfect", who knows? All the rest will stay on the old blogs, being rather personal, and my friends already read them anyway.


So this is a fresh new start in blogland. Cheers!


2 comentarii:

Anonim spunea...

I hope that the "European Day of Languages" encouraged many people to learn a new language. Especially in the United Kingdom where the interest in learning languages seems to be declining.

You may know that four schools in Britain have introduced Esperanto, the neutral international language, in order to test its propaedeutic values?

The pilot project is being monitored by the University of Manchester. Why not extend this project to other countries as well? Further academic appraisal is essential.

An interesting video can be seen at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670

Otherwise http://www.lernu.net might help ?

Patricia spunea...

I really hope so. Our school offers pupils 5 languages for study, English, French, Italian, Spanish and German. Also, due to many pupils belonging to the Turkish and Tartar community we offer the study of Turkish too. Unfornately, kids don't get to choose all the time, because probably they'd prefer Italian to French etc. and then some teachers would be forced to seek work some place else.

The interest for foreign languages is declining here too, as long as people get to speak English.

Kids here study a foreign language ever since they're in the first grade, one hour a week. And subtitles help when they watch movies so quite many Romanians manage with their knowledge in this respect.

I didn't know about the esperanto project but I know here no one would be interested, unfortunately.

Thanks for your comment and links.