In October the students from Novara and from Figueres created their blogs and introduced themselves, including some photos. All these had been hard work. I do a lot of classes with my students, but Maria, from Porto, and Catherine, from Novara, do not see them quite often. So, they spent more weeks creating their blogs and writing the introduction. Catherine’s students and the students from Figueres also wrote about their own cities.

During this term they seemed quite interested in doing the project and they always asked me to go to the computer’s room and write in their blogs again. They love reading their classmates’ blogs and writing comments on them. They do it in English. So, in this way, without noticing it, they are working with two skills: writing and reading.

Creating their blogs was a bit difficult at first. Some of the students, as always, forgot their password and they had to create the blog again.

In November we included another group of students in our project, the students of 4th C, they are weaker students with low motivation to learn. From now on, their English teacher, Maria José is going to work with their blogs once a week, and we will try to do the same than in the other classes. During this month MªJosé and I worked together and I helped her with some aspects of the blog. Her class enjoyed working in the project and sending us comments.

In December we decided to include a writing about Grease because our students went to Barcelona to see it and they also performed some scenes of the musical on Friday, before the Christmas’ holidays. They rehearsed with their music teacher and the performance was amazing!

Our Italian partners explained interesting things about their food.

WHICH WERE THE MAIN DIFFICULTIES??

• Make them WORK!! ( no photologs, no copy and paste, no translator!!!)
• Get them used to WRITING and THINKING!!!
• Share their work and LEARNING TO COOPERATE ( not just one of them working!)
• Challenge them so that they get interested in the activities.
• Make the GOOD students work! (some of them go to out-of-school classes, they have a higher level, but they do the activity in five minutes and that’s it! No interest in improving their English with open activities like that!)
• Make the WEAKER students work. ( Grouping them is sometimes difficult weaker with weaker may find the activity too difficult and weaker-stronger might end in a lazy one doing nothing!!)