We received the postcards from Sweden today. The big and fat envelope was waiting for me in my mailbox today when I came to work. It was perfect timing because our Can I Help You? -lesson is from 10-12 on Fridays. When we started our lesson we took some time to talk about the trip and looked at the two towns in a map to see how far away our friends are. The we handed out the postcards and each of our students read out his/her card in Finnish to the others and we figured out the difficult parts together. Our students told us that they had been writing emails and chatting on Facebook with the Latvian students. We talked about the hosting plan and we told our students to be prepared for changes because there always are changes in a project like this. Someone might get sick in the host family or one of our students might not be able to travel. We also told the students that our wish has been not to place two Finns in the family, so they are not expecting anything else. It would be such a shame if at the end of this project we’d have to conclude that the students only ended up talking Finnish with each other and made their hosts sad not understanding a word their guests said the whole time they were there. We all know how easily that happens. And we also told that to our students and we told them that we will be trying to convince Gaida to change the hosts. They did not object at all. We know that some of the students are only 13, but in the end we feel that it is more important to make the students use English and give them the opportunity to live with someone from both Sweden and Latvia. We also talked about the importance of respecting the hosts choices whatever Gaida and her students decide to do. Our students will be guests in your homes and they will be grateful for any plan you decide to make about hosting.
After reading the postcards and the Swedish blog our students couldn’t wait to get to the computers to answer all your questions. Henna found a message in her email inbox and wanted to write back immediately. The Finnish bit in her postcard had said that she is going to rest and eat candy during weekend and in her email there was a reply: “I hope you rested well.” I can’t begin to describe how excited she was. Every single student had such a strong need to communicate in a foreign language in that moment that it almost mad us tear up, keeping in mind that these students have always been the ones who have hated languages and felt like they can’t say a word in English and don’t even want to try. We decided to make our replies in the form of a Friendship Book. I’m sure you’ve seen those little booklets that elementary school kids usually have. Each kid has one book and (s)he asks all his/her friends to write in things about themselves, like for example: My name is… My family consists of… My favorite food is… My favorite animals are… I like… I hate… etc. So we asked our students to write the beginning of the sentence in bold so that our Swedish and Latvian friends can copy-paste that into their own posts and finish the sentence with their own information. So this is what we ask each of your students to do for us:
1. Take for example Siri’s post.
2. Copy-paste it to your own post in your own blog.
3. Delete the rest and leave only the part that is written in bold.
4. Fill in the sentences so that it is about you.
5. Publish your posts for us to see.
Can I Help You? - Teacher Blog 
ps. The students were so excited about answering your questions that they all needed our help at the same time and we didn’t have time to help everyone, so there are more grammar mistakes in the posts this time. Also, some kids write that we have 800 students and some 500-600, that is because just a few years ago we had 800 but a new school was built next to us and also the age groups have come down drastically in the numbers of kids, so we have about 550 atm.