VoiceS - Integrated competences for European Teachers. Giving voice(s) to professionalism and citizenship in school networking.
European Dance & Song Book
Çağlar ANMAÇ (VoiceS Member of the Turkish national group, caglar.anmac@hotmail.com)
Nuria BIOSCA (VoiceS Member of the Spanish national group, nbıosca@xtec.cat)
Mari Luz CASTELLANO (VoiceS Member of the Spanish national group, mcast284@xtec.cat)
Hester LANGKAMP-WAANDERS (VoiceS Member of the Netherlandish national group, hlangkamp@marcantonderwıjs.nl)
Related modules:
European Citizenship
European Professionalism (School Concepts)
Year of publication: 2014
Introduction
Music is part of our lives. And so is communication. When we meet new people, we want to communicate with them. In most European schools, children learn English at a young age. But learning a new language is not easy. And young children learn by playing, dancing and singing.
So why not combine these? That's what the European Dance and Songbook does.
In our schools we work with children who are from 7 to 11 years old. We made presentations from our national festivities. So we can learn more about each other. And at the end of the project we made a live connection through Google Hangout. We danced and sang together the song, "Happy" byPharrell Williams.
Description of the project
Learning about each other with the help of the music and dance. Young children are eager to learn about the world surrounding them. They learn best when it is combined with music. We want to use this quality to give them a chance to learn more about young children in Catalona, Turkey and the Netherlands.
In all three countries, we have a national festival in April. We each made a presentation about this festival. We also made a video of a traditional dance and song. This is the preparation for our synchronous (live) meeting. On Monday 2nd of June we make a live-connection and we sang and danced together. We found that we had a lot of songs in common. So we chose a multilingual song, common in each country, and sang it in owr own language. Then the children were able to hear the knew song in their own but also in another language. Because they knew the song, better understood it. And the end, we sang a popular song in English, the mutual language: "Happy" by Pharell Williams.
As a result of this project the children will learn more about the differences and similarities between our countries.
It's a first start to communicating, learning and liveing together.
Objectives / Aims
- to value each other
- to respect the differences and similarities between individuals and cultures
- to learn a song and a dance in a different language
Activities
- making a video about the national festivals in April
- showing the presentations to the children
- making a video based on a traditional song and dance
- showing the videos of the traditional songs and dances to the children
- preparing a mulitlingual, common song ("Old Mac Donald") in owr own language and in English
- singing this song through video conference
- singing and dancing together the modern song ("Happy") through video conference
- filling the evaluation form
Summary
We all enjoyed singing and dancing the "Happy song" and "Old Mac Donald". Together with the presentations we learned more about Turkey, the Netherlands and Catalonia.
Presentation of the projects
We made our own website: https://sites.google.com/site/tunecagraz/
Project Website https://sites.google.com/site/tunecagraz/
There you can see the presentations. In the following chapters you can see some more information about the project from the different countries.