All Roads Lead to Manchester.

Tomorrow is an exciting day. Tomorrow, I will meet people I have only spoken to by email for the past 9 months.

Last January, our school hosted teachers from England and Spain. We met to put together an application for a Comenius Project ( projects for European schools funded by the European Commission for Education). The other schools were unable to attend the meeting.

Our project is entitled "Our Place in Space" and in June we received word that five of our original schools were accepted for project funding. Our project partners are England, Poland, Spain and Turkey.
Our school is the project co-ordinator and it is part of my post of responsibility.

To date we have recorded the weather for two weeks and compared results. If you like heat, Seville (Spain) was the place to be. If you like overcast cool weather, you could have had your pick of Manchester in England or Enniscorthy in Ireland

We have recorded our children saying "Hello. My name is..... I am ..years old," in their native language. This should be simple. However in Ireland, Irish, while it is our native language, for the majority of people it is their second language. So my class, who have just begun school, heard it for the first time a couple of weeks ago. Our children have to learn their "native language"

Among the other activities to be completed this month is a PowerPoint presentation of our schools, the exchange of proverbs. We are also going to begin a blog to record the project activities.  We will exchange proverbs. It will be interesting to see if we have proverbs in common.

The children  in my school have been busy preparing a large notice board for the project. They have drawn maps of Europe and individual maps of of partner schools on a board that is 2.4m square. They are now looking forward to painting them.

 Tomorrow my colleague and I fly to Manchester for our first project meeting. We have been given a list of questions by our students for the Manchester pupils. We have a hectic schedule for the next four days. It ranges from meeting the children, to a discussion of the next phase of the project, we visit a secondary school, meet the major, visit Old Trafford and go to the ballet. But more than all this, I'm looking forward to meeting and chatting to people who  up to now were  simply names on the end of emails, and to meet again the three teachers who came to Ireland. We will see our planning become reality. I should even get the chance to practise my Turkish. Lots of blog fodder I hope!

Please forgive my absence visiting your blogs for the past couple of weeks and this week too. I hope start catching up next week. In the meantime I'm off to explore Manchester's "Place in Space"