Friday was our first official project week day. Sari Lantto started the day by going through the agenda and the activities of the day. Hanna Viippola and some of our students made everyone get up and dance with a GoNoodle-video. Mirjami Hyttinen’s role was to document the activities.

After the GoNoodle-dance our students and also we teachers started playing a game called Party Charades on iPads. “Describe the word on the card without saying what it is! Name the word or action on the card without saying a word!”

After about every 15 minutes we made the students change groups to guarantee everyone would have a chance to talk to as many different students as possible. The game turned out to be a lot of fun and suited well for our 11-18-year old students. 

After the ice breaking activities students started working together making Keynote presentations about Melzo and Ylitornio. Students covered topics such as Finnish and Italian traditions, culture, food, music, animals, nature etc. The age difference between our students was 2-7 years, which meant they had different levels of English skills. However, most language problems during different activities were solved by using Google Translator.

The final project groups were revealed in puzzles that students had to put together to form cards containing the names of the group members. Before the teams started working we had a couple of team building activities such as teaching each other some important words in Italian and Finnish and a snow sculpting activity. Especially the Italians loved this superhero snow sculptures -activity.