Building Bridges across Europe is an eTwinning project that involved schools from Italy, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Turkey, Germany and Albania with the aim of connecting hearts and minds across cultures. Students had the chance of collaborating and creating content while fostering friendship, understanding other ways of living and communicating in English as a global bridge. They introduced each other, wrote letters and sent them just like their teachers used to do when they were younger! This was a very interesting and fun experience for them as they had never written a letter in their life before!
Then they created presentations about their towns and schools, participated in online meetings in which they could talk about their habits and play games together with peers from other countries.
Two of the most engaging activities were creating ebooks in mixed nationality teams.
For the first set of ebooks students focussed on Teenage life around Europe and they described relevant activities about sports, music, festivities, tourisms, food. The second set of ebooks is a collection of stories on important values such as friendship, respect for nature, kindness, honesty, justice, empathy, well–being. Students wrote the stories themselves in a collaborative way: pupils from a school started a story, then students from the other schools added more adventures and a group from another school created the ending. To create the stories students had to read their peers’ work, ask them questions, leave comments and negotiate the ending.
Working together wasn’t always: trying to create a common work is demanding and requires soft skills that young students haven’t already acquired. So this project was an important “journey” towards growing up and we can say that it successfully strengthened students’ English communication, digital literacy, and intercultural understanding. It also encouraged empathy, curiosity, and confidence—key qualities for becoming active global citizens.
The ebooks are available at this link:
Classe 1AIT
