Welcome to our page. We have been working on our Friends & Flags project & finally finished it. It was mailed to our circle group.
Friends and Flags is a multicultural collaborative Internet project that began in Israel by a teacher who was originally from Montreal. Karen Eini the coordinator of this project created Friends & Flags because it was her dream to communicate with children in other countries about her country.
There are approximately 200 classes involved in this project with approximately 30 countries.
Gardenview School is registered in the program and is one of six schools in a mailing circle. We are in constant communication with these other schools and countries through e-mail. The children in our circle are from Finland, Denmark, Israel, Ireland, and the USA. The children range in grades from grades 4 to 8. They are both boys and girls and range in ages from 9 years old to 13 years old. All the children in my class have opened an email account with the help of our school computer teacher.
The children were responsible for checking their e-mail regularly and bringing in any communication they received to share with the class.
The class has been divided into 7 groups where each group is responsible for preparing a package on a specific topic related to either Montreal, Quebec, or Canada. The sections include: Country Identification, Our School, Our Community, Our Concerns, National Sports, National Holidays, National Foods, National Arts & Crafts, & Tourism.
Each of these sections will then be put together into a booklet so that they can be mailed to country partners in our circle. Our country partners will be mailing us a package of there country.
The children were also divided into other groups where they had to put together a collage of items available in Montreal such as: bus tickets, chocolate bar wrappers, movie tickets etc. In each collage their were certain requirements so that specific things could be compared across the world. An example of this was a coca cola label.
In addition to our written project we were required to make 7 squares for a patch work quilt that we can put together with each of the other squares we receive from our partner countries. The squares were done with the help of a few class moms. These squares are included with our written project upon mailing. In addition we were also asked to send one to the program co-ordinator of the program. A large quilt will be made in Israel by the coordinator upon receiving the squares from all the participating countries.
Through out the project the children were given the opportunity to work with various class members in different ways. They had to decide what they were going to cover on there particular topic and prepare an outline. They did research on both the Internet and with books. The children had the opportunity to read, write and verbalize their ideas. All this allowed the children to come up with creative ways to put their individual sections together so that they would be both informative and interesting for our receiving schools to see. Those children that have artistic talents were able to use them when putting together their written presentations
Once all the class projects were completed the children presented their own sections to the members of the class, their parents, and to members of the school board along with the media. Two local papers reported on this event with one of them including a picture of some of the children.
The parents were pleased and impressed seeing what the children did on there own and seeing the collaborative effort they made in putting this entire project together. The childrens' enthusiasm carried over to other children in the school who wanted to know if we had heard from our friends in other countries, as well as to the staff who wanted to see the final project that the children had done.
On completion of the presentations of the projects they will be sent to our mailing circle. We will also wait for the arrival of the projects from the other countries. The children will have the opportunity to learn about these other countries. As these other countries will learn about Canada. The children will also be able to continue to communicate with there e-pals that they have met in a structured school setting.
Seeing the enthusiasm of the children this year, seeing how all children, including a few special needs children, felt such a huge amount of success with this project I would definitely pursue doing this project again with another group of children during another school year.
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