Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group Newsletter no. 5 - July 2015 | Page 94
Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2015 Newsletter
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Teaching English through creative story
writing
by Loredana Popa
We all know that nowadays children would rather
spend time online than read or write, which makes
it that much harder for English teachers, like
myself. Students no longer feel motivated to read a
short story, to write a few paragraphs and the
reason why had eluded me for a while… but when it
did reveal itself, it was like a friendly slap on the
back of my head. Now, would you write something
if you knew the only feedback you were going to
get would come from your teacher and your peers?
Would you read a story just when you are not
invested in it? No, you would not.
My plans for the future are certainly to continue
improving my eTwinning projects, to follow
eTwinning webinars and Learning events, to
promote and disseminate eTwinning in schools in
the region and on social networks. I'll certainly pay
special attention to pedagogical aspects of
TwinSpace and to the greater involvement of
students in direct communication with pupils from
the partner schools, which is proved to be the most
impressive segment of the projects in practice for
them.
So, there it was one day, at the beginning of
October 2015… an invitation to an eTwinning
project called “Let’s write a story”. After discussing
the idea with all my 6th graders, that is 3 entire
classes, we decided to take a leap of faith and try it
out. We would work during the classes, after
school, from home and put all our talent to the test.
Each school would send one list of 20 words
monthly, 10 nouns, 5 verbs and 5 adjectives and all
the other schools would write and illustrate stories
with as many lists as possible and post them online.
The best part was that the lists we would send our
partners contained words the students had come
across in class or outside it during that month.
And so it began… a project that would alter our take
on reading comprehension, writing and teamwork.
23 schools from Poland, Czech Republic, Greece,
Georgia, Spain, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Italy, UK,
Latvia, Romania, Ukraine, Netherlands and the
Republic of Moldova got to know each other first by
means of videos and pictures. Next, each school
created the teams that would work together on the
stories. Each team had between 4 and 8 students.
Finding the ideal team configuration was a hard one
to crack.
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We all have those students who prefer not to get
involved but get credit, and those who do all the
work so their team wins, those who like bossing
people around and those who would love to work
but lack the confidence. No matter how you create
the teams there will always be complaints. So, we
had to change the teams as we went along. First, I
let my students pick their own teams, made sure
they all understood that each one had a specific
role in the team, according to his/her strengths. I
also asked them to write a sentence or two on what
every member of the team did and give that to me
together with the story at the end of the month.
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