Our Grand Comenius Launch

After making initial contact with our partners via

e.Twinning, we introduced this, our second project, to the children , governors and

parents.

Welcome to our Comenius launch!We were very excited because our school was going to host the first visit. In November 2013 teachers came from Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Italy, Poland and Bulgaria. We learnt a few phrases in these languages so that we could welcome our guests. The School Council judged two design competitions. First they chose me, Trashy, to be our school avatar. You will see me on many of our presentations. Next they chose the ECO-PALS logo which was designed by a friend in Belgium. Again, you will come to recognise this logo over the two years.

An exciting week was enjoyed by everyone.

By Trashy

We started to look at how we could make the world a better place. There are so many things for us to take care of. Where to start? That was the question. It seemed to us that everything rolls into one. We decided that we needed to get as many people to help us as possible, so we thought long and hard …

Putting our enterprise hats on, we thought that we could invite many stakeholders into school if we had a big enough hook. So this is what we did…

We invited lots of important people who we thought might be able to help us. They tasted food and drink from our partner countries.

Poland

Italy

Bulgaria

Portugal Spain

Belgium

England, Yorkshire

We invited them to look at some of the work we had done on endangered species …

To help prevent people wasting plastic carrier bags we designed some eco bags. We all drew our own faces in support of this good cause and then had the bags made up.

In LKS2 we created comics to show how we could encourage people to help save some of our endangered species from extinction. I appeared in each comic as the superhero!

It would be a great shame if our grandchildren couldn’t ever see a nut-brown hare or a hedgehog.

We made a DVD about the fox. ‘What does the fox say?’

We sang the song in English, French and British Sign Language. We also choreographed the dance moves.

We didn’t just want to think about ourselves so, in LKS2, we recycled yoghurt pots and made them into plant pots. The money we raised from these bought a goat for the inhabitants of a small Kenyan village.

We regularly have a Fair Trade stall so we included that too.

In KS1 our theme was ‘Handa’s Surprise’. We learnt that many of the animals in the story are in danger of hunters.

We read some of the Elmer stories and decided to make these patchwork pictures

From the sale of these pictures, we were able to adopt an elephant.

This is Jubilee

We realised that a big problem in many African countries was a shortage of rain.

Traditionally, in certain cultures, in different parts of the world, many believe that rainmakers can produce rain, magically.

We made some rainmakers out of recycled materials. We are not sure if they work but this is something we will look at in more detail later.

Lengths of ribbon and odd buttons were turned into beautiful jewellery at our after school jewellery club.

Milk bottle tops and old wax crayons were turned into beautiful pieces of art work and were very popular.

UKS2 made biodegradable plant pots and planted sweet pea seeds in them.

Children in the Foundation Unit grew sunflowers from seeds and then painted the result.

The event was very popular and we are sure everybody now knows about our project.

We are looking forward to learning more about how we can save our planet.

Thank you for helping to spread the word!