Global Partnerships
Year 5 Exchange Trip to Germany
One of our Key Curriculum Drivers is 'Being Part of a Global Community'. We feel passionately that it is important for our children to grow up knowing about the world in which they live and developing an understanding of their responsibilities as global citizens.
Each year group has a global partner country which they will learn about in depth and some have a partner school whom they will communicate with. Our curriculum provides us with the opportunities through each theme to examine a range of global issues relevant to their lives in the real world.
Year 4 Zoom Call to Austria
Year 5’s global partner is Germany and Evangelische Grundschule Babelsberg. Children have enjoyed exchanging pen pal letters, Easter parcels and taking part in video calls to see their global friends and speak to them. Our school Curriculum Driver for the summer term is ‘Being Part of a Global Community’ and it was fantastic to see our children embracing this so enthusiastically!
Here is what the children had to say:
"I enjoyed the call because we had a chance to meet everyone, we got to know what their names were and what they liked" - Evie
"I liked it when we joined the call because they were really excited to see us and eager to ask us questions" - Freddie
"I really enjoyed finding out their hobbies because we like similar things" - Maikls
"It was really cool how they like similar stuff to most of us like sports and video games" - Maggie
"I really liked it when they told us about their favourite sports - my penpal likes football. It was nice to see them" - Howi
"I liked meeting my penpal. Sienna on the call was really excited to meet Sienna in our class!" - Madison
"I really enjoyed the video call because we got to meet our German penpals. We still got to meet them and talk about how we are, how many pets we have, how many siblings we have and things like that. It meant that we still got to see them even though we couldn’t actually visit Germany because of covid" - Harland
"I liked how we had a lot of things in common! Some of us had the same hobbies, played the same instruments and things like that. Our names were all different, which was interesting!" - Naomi
Our Global Heritage Project
As part of our 2021 Global Week, we conducted a survey with the school community to find out where in the world everyone comes from. The survey also created a fantastic opportunity for the children to conduct further research and explore their country of heritage such as:
finding out the main language(s) spoken and learning how to say something in that language
exploring (or even cooking) traditional foods
investigating customs and festivals
identifying the flag
exploring the geography of the country such as capital city, climate, mountains, rivers, national parks, etc
investigating the native wildlife
As a result of this project, we recorded a fantastic 35 different countries! These are England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, South Africa, America, Romania, Canada, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, France, Slovakia, Malta, Italy, Australia, Gibraltar, Cyprus, Latvia, India, Ukraine, Guernsey, Mauritius, Sweden, Portugal, Pakistan, Belgium, New Zealand, Moldova, Greece, Jamaica, Switzerland, Saint Lucia , Thailand, Serbia.
We have celebrated this project with a vibrant display of flags which represent everyone's heritage in the Bluecoat Hall.
Global learning across the school
Each year group is currently active in building opportunities within the curriculum to learn more about their partner countries, the culture, traditions and way of life through their maths, English, science, topic, geography, history, MFL and PSHE subjects. Work is taught in a cross curricular approach and with examples saved into year group books to demonstrate the global learning that is happening across subjects.
Through the British Council and the UK-German Connection, Year 5 has made a link with Evangelische Grundschule Babelsberg in Germany near Berlin. Both schools have been Skyping and the children are getting to know each other. They have written pen pal letters and they have begun to learn about Germany. There has been a curriculum established where children in both schools have begun working on joint partnership projects including Unity and Strength, Justice and Equality, and Sustainable Development.
Connecting Classrooms Project.pdfReport on German Exchange.pdf