This is the title of our AIESEC EDUCHANGE project for the school year 2016-2017. The title is the expression of the hope that we had and the goal that we wanted to reach with this project, that means to learn and study about the environment and about natural disasters and to go back to the natural world with a more conscious and more careful approach.
The project was co-taught by the AIESEC volunteers with the help from the teachers of my school. The language of the project was English, so sometimes teachers needed to help the students to understand and manage the content of the lessons, even though the material prepared for the lessons had been chosen according to the students' level of English. Our volunteers for this project came from Sri Lanka and were two wonderful newly graduated teachers called Rishini and Dilshani.
The students and the teachers got to know them and got to love them during those six weeks. The first two weeks of their stay were dedicated to getting to know them and their county of origin: Sri Lanka
In these pictures students are trying to find information cards and pictures about Sri Lanka. Those pictures had been spread along the school corridors. The younger chìldren of primary school worked on a little booklet about Sri Lanka.
Blended learning combined traditional teaching techniques and the use of technology in the classroom.
These are some of the students' works after the first two weeks.
From the 3rd to 6th week each class worked on a specific natural disaster: tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunami, pollution, volcanoes, animals in danger, climate change, rainforests, wildfires, flooding. Having Rishini and Dilshani in the classrooms explaining and teaching all this added an extra human value to these topics. I remember when Dilshani told our third year secondary school students about the Tsunami she experienced in Sri Lanka. I remember the silence and the attention that all the students were paying to her. It was such a touching moment.
At the end of the 6th week we organised a final moment in the main hall. All the classes had the chance to explain what they had been working on. It was a precious moment in which all the work done by single classes made sense to form the bigger picture.
The Aiesec Educhange project contributed to improve the English language communication but it also gave us a wonderful opportunity to get to know the culture of a country which seems so far away from us, but in reality it is not that far or that different from us. Strong ties were born during this experience: families invited Rishini and Dilshani over their houses for dinners, teachers went out with them, students invited them to hang out during the afternoon and, I was able to meet them again in the summer 2017 when I went to Sri Lanka with my husband! Those two girls were only Aiesec volunteers at the beginning of the project, but they became our special friends by the end of it!
Thank you,
Miss Alex
From the 3rd to 6th week each class worked on a specific natural disaster: tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunami, pollution, volcanoes, animals in danger, climate change, rainforests, wildfires, flooding. Having Rishini and Dilshani in the classrooms explaining and teaching all this added an extra human value to these topics. I remember when Dilshani told our third year secondary school students about the Tsunami she experienced in Sri Lanka. I remember the silence and the attention that all the students were paying to her. It was such a touching moment.
The Aiesec Educhange project contributed to improve the English language communication but it also gave us a wonderful opportunity to get to know the culture of a country which seems so far away from us, but in reality it is not that far or that different from us. Strong ties were born during this experience: families invited Rishini and Dilshani over their houses for dinners, teachers went out with them, students invited them to hang out during the afternoon and, I was able to meet them again in the summer 2017 when I went to Sri Lanka with my husband! Those two girls were only Aiesec volunteers at the beginning of the project, but they became our special friends by the end of it!
Thank you,
Miss Alex
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