Larisa CARAGI: Our children are tired of studying for the sake of studying
Larisa CARAGI
Romanian language and literature teacher, Lyceum ‚Emil Nicula’, Mereni, Anenii Noi
I’ve been working as an eTwinner teacher for 5 years. I have almost 30 years experience as a teacher, and only in the last 5 years I began to rediscover my profession thanks to the eTwinning platform. At the time, it was really a novelty for Moldovan education. The collaboration on such a scale with European countries did not exist.
Initially, I didn’t even understand what this platform meant. I joined the platform out of mere curiosity. There was a time when I used to research everything I could research, and indeed, at the time I was a little shy, I didn’t dare to prove myself or come up with project ideas. But it was not long before eTwinning conquered me. I began to participate in projects created by my colleagues from European schools. The pupils were enthusiastic about new activities. I recognize that Romania is closer to me than other countries because we speak the same language and we have a lot in common. Now, I can say that the platform gives me the opportunity to do what I like, what I can and what I know best. I implement projects related to Romanian language, our national culture, our values and, thus, I gain not only as the Romanian language and literature teacher, but also as a person.
Our children managed to build partnerships with schools from the Republic of Moldova and from other countries, and found out that they are like everyone else, they are neither worse nor better, because it turned out that what their colleagues from other schools were doing is the same what we are based on: promoting our national values, traditions and passing them down through the generations.
This year, our lyceum has become known at the European level, because we are one of the few schools that have been awarded the European Quality Label for ‚At home for Christmas’ project. This eTwinning project has put us on the map, so to say.
The ‚At home for Christmas’ project aims to raise children’s awareness and preserve all the Christmas traditions. For everyone, Christmas is a family holiday. Therefore, we focused primarily on the involvement of the whole family in activities. Finally, we made a common recipe book for all participating schools. The recipe book included traditional Christmas recipes, including Moldovan cozonac and aspic. For me, the collaboration of pupils with parents was very important, starting from creating a recipe, especially since it is the subject from the curriculum for Romanian language, then the cooking process itself and, finally, a photo of the team that worked on this recipe book with food made.
In addition to the recipe book, under ‚At home for Christmas’ project, children and parents made Christmas tree toys from recyclable materials. We wanted to show that you can have a good holiday without having too much money. Children were highly enthusiastic, the pupils from the whole class came up with one toy made at home and, of course, each child showed great ingenuity and creativity. We also had a unique fir-tree in 2018, we dressed it for the second time.
In addition, each school involved in the project sang a Christmas carol, captured it on video and put it on the eTwinning platform. We ended up with a Skype conference. Each school prepared various activities and we evaluated the entire project. It was a great ending, and the children were very impressed. Six schools from Moldova and Romania were involved in the project. This is the first project in which I am the founder. It was my lucky ticket to join the eTwinning platform.
Our children are tired of studying for the sake of studying. Therefore, eTwinning is a beautiful cross-border collaboration and discovery of immense opportunities offered by information technologies today. There are many new tools that we use with teachers and pupils. It’s very easy. And all these things come from eTwinning, I came down with them here and I don’t want to be cured.
