Barnaby Bear will travel to various schools to celebrate his birthday. Each class will celebrate his birthday reflecting how birthdays are celebrated in their culture i.e. creating birthday cards, recording and singing Happy Birthday in native language, hosting a birthday party, engaging in flash meetings/virtual classroom with the other classes explaning how they celebrated Barnaby's birthday. This project will be six weeks in duration. Participating classes can prepare the materials with their class, then share in the twinspace and look at and respond to how other countries have celebrated. It will be for children aged 4-6 years. It is hoped at the end of the project that each class could host a multicultural birthday party incorporating elements of each culture to celebrate Barnaby's birthday.

• Subjects: Art, Citizenship, Cross Curricular, Drama, European Studies, Informatics / ICT, Language and Literature, Music, Pre-school Subjects, Primary School Subjects
• Languages: EN
• Pupil's age: 4 - 6
• Tools to be used: Audio conference, Chat, e-mail, Forum, MP3, Other software (Powerpoint, video, pictures and drawings), Project Diary, Twinspace, Video conference, Virtual learning environment (communities, virtual classes, ...)
• Aims: That the children will share their expereinces of celebrating birthdays in their culture. That the children will learn about how... read moreThat the children will share their expereinces of celebrating birthdays in their culture. That the children will learn about how other cultures celebrate birthdays. That they children will compare and contrast how birthdays are celebrated in different cultures. That the children will have the opporunity to use ICT tools to create and share information with children in other countries. That the children will incorporate elements of each culture to create a multicultural birthday party for Barnaby Bear. hide
• Work process: It is intended that the first two weeks of the project (20th February to 5th March) will be spent developing... read moreIt is intended that the first two weeks of the project (20th February to 5th March) will be spent developing the materials to show how the class celebrated Barnaby's birthday. In these weeks each participating class will introduce Barnaby, tell the children it is his birthday, discuss how they could celebrate it, create materials i.e. Powerpoints of pictures of celebrations i.e. decorations, record mp3 of class singing Happy Birthday in their native language, use Paint to create Birthday cards, create a birthday menu of food and post on the blog, video conference the staging of Barnaby's birthday party. Not all these activities have to be carried out as each class may have specific activities they would like to share. In the next three weeks of the project (March 5th - 26th) each participating class will post their materials to the twinspace for the other classes to explore, so they can learn about how birthday's are celebrated in other countries. During these three weeks classes will also organise a virtual conference between their classes so that we can ask some simple questions about Barnaby's birthday in their class. In the final week March 26th - 30th each participating class can host a multicultural party for Barnaby that incorporates elements of each country the children have learned about during the project. hide
• Expected results: It is hoped that at the end of the project the children will have learned about how birthdays are celebrated... read moreIt is hoped that at the end of the project the children will have learned about how birthdays are celebrated in other countries, how to use ICT tools to communicate with children in other countries and also be open to further projects to continue to learn more about children who live in other countries. hide

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