Building Bridges in Sonderborg

Building Bridges in Sonderborg

Mrs. Paula Vorne 

1st grade teacher

Maikkula Comprehensive school is privileged to be a part of a Comenius project called ”Building Bridges from North to the South”. Our first meeting was held in Sonderborg, Denmark at the end of September. Trip to Sonderborg didn’t go quite as planned due to a technical failure in the airplane so we had we had to make an extra landing to Helsinki instead of flying straight to Copenhagen. We were really happy when we finally reached Sonderborg at 2AM.

Main goal for this first meeting was to get to know our partners from Denmark, France, Italy and Spain and plan the exercices we would do before the next meeting. We also learned about the different school systems in all participating countries. It was really interesting to hear how similar and yet different the school systems in different corners of Europe really are. I think we’d have a lot to learn from each other.

Every class that is involved in this project gets a pen pal-class from another country and the pupils make personal profiles to the Moodle-platform that is used in this project. Children are really expecting to get to know the pupils from the other countries. All the participating schools build a Comenius wall to their own school and all partners send some material on that wall. Before Christmas we will film children singing traditional Christmas songs and send the film to our partners via Moodle. 

Our Danish hosts had arranged us a lot of interesting program for our three day visit. We got to participate to the lessons, the students had prepared presentations for us of their city, Denmark and capital Copenhagen and they prepared a delicious lunch for us representing traditional Danish foods. We also got really nice sightseeing tours to the island of Als and saw some really beautiful and interesting places although the first day there was a real autumn storm in the area.

Three days in Sonderborg with our Comenius friends were filled with laughter and talk in many different languages. We spent so much time together that we were a really tight group when the trip was over. Thank you so much to our Danish hosts for three amazing days in Sonderborg! Next meeting is in Cogoleto, Italy in February 2013 and I think that everyone is really looking forward to meeting others again. At least I am!