My colleague and I both have eight-graders this year and we would like to have them involved in a project next year, starting from August 2012 and ending in May 2013. We plan to apply for Nordplus Junior funding in order to cover traveling for the students and teachers from three countries, e.g. Finland – Latvia – Estonia or Finland – Estonia – Norway.
Our goal is to involve students who struggle with English even though they have been studying it for six years. We would like to have them write short dialogues, interviews, and stories etc. and post them with photos on a blog like for example this one I have opened for this purpose. Katriina and I would help them to write better English and we believe that they would become more fluent in the course of this project so that when we meet in the spring they would be more fluent in talking with your students. We could make short and easy powerpoint presentations, photostories, maybe even videos or animations etc and embed them in the blog. Good topics for the tasks could be e.g. presenting yourself and your home, town, school and country; traveling; food etc. We would like our weakest students to have better communicative skills in English when they graduate in 18 months. Not everyone has to complete every single task, but instead we can agree on which tasks are done by everyone and how. All this planning could be done in this teacher blog. Students would share their work on in their blog and comment on each others’ posts. This is our vision at the moment but we are open for ideas and suggestions.
Nordplus Junior is based on the idea that each student and teacher gets 330 euros for traveling for five working days abroad. Students host each other in their homes. Teachers get an extra 335 euros each for a week to pay for hostel and food. We are planning to apply for the money in order to ‘prevent high school dropouts’. So the ultimate goal is to help the weaker students to do better. We are hoping to involve students who are trustworthy, positive, eager to learn and eager to host foreign students. Next week we will know for sure how many students have elected our course (which is called Can I Help You), it is an elective course on the ninth grade, one double lesson each week. We have another Nordplus Junior project in our school, I have applied funds for it since 2009 and we have always got full grant. These two projects are completely separate and the acceptance of our application is not dependent on the other project. Here is the English website for our school. You will find lots of links to our previous project in the Collaboration page. On the Official Finnish website there are even more photos and videos.
Can I Help You? - Teacher Blog 