Category: cultural awareness

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s e-mail from CILT about Europe Day (see yesterday’s post), today I received a message from Pamela Powers at the European Parliament about Spring Day in Europe;

Investigating the Spring Day website, it seems that there are various benefits to registering for the day – such as involvement with other classes and schools, taking part in competitions and receiving a certificate of participation for your involvement – always popular in schools with SMT :o)

Content is in 23 different languages, allowing for access to the site in the language studied as well as English, and the ability to compare text (and I assume activities) in different languages. At the same time, the whole day is based on the discovery of other cultures and traditions, thus covering ICU strand. There are online games, ecards to send and podcasts too which make my evolving techie side smile! You can find out more about activities, past events and how to register on the Spring Day for Europe 2008 site.

At the time of writing there are 1113 schools registered – I’m about to make it 1114.

What about you?

I spend a fortune on resources for school so I’m always up for a freebie. Instant Display is a site well known to those that frequent TES staffroom and particularly the ‘Parasites Paradise’ thread, (so called because all the listed sites offer free resources.) Instant Display offers reasonably priced posters and resources such as labels for use in Primary classrooms (although, as with all resources, there’s scope for use with older kids too) – you choose your resource(s), pay by Paypal and the link to the resource is sent to you very promptly in my experience. There are a number of MFL resources available , particularly in French such as number cards, weather posters and classroom instruction cards, as well as some Spanish and German resources too. Each set costs £2.

And there is also a free section!! In this section you can find several French resources, including colours, counting, converting euros, weather and En France (things associated with France).

The reason I thought of posting at this particular juncture is that there are a number of free Christmas resources on the site including a set of Merry Christmas posters in 18 languages, and Christmas around the world, a set of posters featuring traditions from different countries, places and continents including Poland, China, Hawaii, Denmark, Bethlehem and Africa.

I’ve printed and laminated them, and made quiz trail around the school – greetings in KS1 and traditions in KS2. With productions etc at this time of year, there is a lot of lining up in corridors and spare moments to fill, so this seemed a popular idea. This week I’ve followed it up with questions on the school website – 5 per day – to encourage families to join in the fun. It’s all part of my strategy to raise cultural awareness in the school – and it’s also fun!

In case you want to join in, I’ll put the questions in the Goodies Box – or you can go to the Whitehouse Common school website .