2) STUDENTS - Getting into the subject

  • Thanks to the first activities, students achieved the perfect motivation to get into the subject. In this part of the project, every team organized a wide variety of activities, some of the most important are shared in this folder. 

    Teachers have previously discussed about the movies that pupils could watch, everyone watched shorted movies in English just like in the native language ("Generazioni Connesse's movies" were a good choise for the Italian Language pupils), spots to stand up to bullying and cyber-bullying created by other students all around the world. Italian Group from Secondo Circolo Didattico Comiso watched the American Fantasy and adventure drama "Bridge to Terabithia" that tells the story of a friendship between two teenagers (they are classmates) who create a fantasy world called Terabithia to escape from being bullied at school. Students from the Professional Conservatory of Music in Zaragoza watched two videos: an anti-bullying advert, where a little girl is bullied and we can see the reaction of adults and "Stand up" a short about homophobic bullying (you can see the videos in the materials folder)

    Other activities such as preparing a 10 rules' poster to stand up to bullying in Italian language was prepared by the Italian teachers Mrs Serena Gulino and Mrs Maria Sorvillo (files are available in materials). Working at this activity, pupils talked once again about the best way to behave with their mates and peers (people in general).

    Conservatorio Professional of Zaragoza made an independent work and enriched the project with a beautiful activity. The Principal, Mr. Darío Sierra wrote the song of the project "Be a buddy, don't be a bully" and teacher Mr. Francisco José Balsera wrote the lyrics. Students, with the assistance of the teachers Mr. Juan Bernués, Mr. Ángel Noverques, and Mr. Darío Sierra, played an instrumental version of the song, and Mr. Francisco José Balsera was the cameraman and edited the video.  All the materials used for this activity are located in "The song of the project" subpage.

    The Collaborative Story was the most important part of our project where pupils got totally engaged by their tasks. 

    Our collaborative story involved several groups where one group (Greek kindergartens) started the story and others (Secondo Circolo Didattico Comiso, Mondragone, Croatian team, Marcianise's and finally Conservatorio of Zaragoza) kept on adding threads to it and thus the story evolved. Reading a story written and drew from other schools was very surprising for pupils. None of them have never done such activity before.  

    Kindergartens' pupils from Greece guided by their teachers, had the honour to start the story introducing the little girl Sara, an immigrant from Middle East. They recorded the story in Greek and give it a sweet imprint thanks to their little pupils. Moreover they created another beautiful product (an ebook available below "Little actors") where their pupils played Sara's story.  

    The imagination of the community gave a path one wouldn't have thought of at the beginning. In this way, pupils had the right, and the duty as well, to carry on the story and change the plot introducing new characters, for instance. 

    This experience was very challenging for them and it helped them developing their creativity, their social skills, go deep in bullying through the empathy that they felt with Sara and finally they improved their English.

    Moreover, they learnt how to use the tool storyjumper (we chose storyjumper for our digital storytelling) and, finally, helped by their teachers, included pictures and the dialogues. The last big effort was recording the voice-over. In this way, our beautiful story can be read and listened as well with our pupils' original voices.  

    Interesting, funny and useful, this activity helped them listening to their own accent, find similarities and differences with other groups' accents (for instance the different accent between Italian and Spanish speaking both English!) and they did a big effort to learn their little parts in order to play it as young actors. 

    The last part for many groups was reading their collaborative story in the ebook and in the printed book. The Secondo Circolo Didattico Comiso's group printed the ebook in order to give everyone the chance to save this beautiful work as a treasure made by little hands and great minds. A copy of the printed book was given as a present to the school-library.