Twinning

From DB Primary Wiki

School Twinning Communities

If you would like to participate in a twinning project, please send us a mail at mgreen@editure.co.uk and we will endeavour to find you a school to link to.

A twinning project will link to the non-statutory guidelines for PSHE & Citizenship as follows: KS2 PSHE & Citizenship Objectives: 1a, 2i, 4b, 4f

Overview

This project enables two schools that already have Db Primary to link up in a twinning project and have had a chance to find out about life in another part of the country, exploring the differences as well as the similarities between them.'

The suggested activity covers 3 weeks and involves the class writing a blog, making comments on other children’s blogs and participating in forum discussions leading on from the initial activities.

Preparation time: 20-30 minutes.

You will have to seek out another school using Db Primary willing to twin with your school. You could visit the ‘Twinning Schools’ forum, where you may find a school that has registered their interest in starting a link or ideas of projects that you could carry out.

Once you are ready, you can link your schools by visiting the ‘school’ tab of the administration tool.

Further details on how to do this can be found at our LinkSchools help page.

It will be an idea to create a new community where you can interact with the new school. Once this has been created you can now add accounts from the linked school into the community you created. The article at the above link, gives details on how to do this.

In the Classroom

The project could follow a 3-week structure as outlined below:

Week 1: Introduce the task to the class, perhaps as homework, asking the children to blog about a normal day at school.

Week 2: Children will be added to the community with the other class. Their task is to visit another child’s blog and read what their day is like and make a comment. They should also add to a shared list of questions to ask the other school on the front page.

Week 3: Add a forum to the community for the children to post replies to the questions generated in the first week.

Extension

If things are going well it will be easy to keep the community going and continue to allow the children to interact. The project could be opened up to other classes in the school or you may choose to deepen the level of exchange through collaboration on class projects. Some ideas may include:

• Children work in groups to introduce an aspect of school life such as:
• subjects you study
• lunchtime/playtime
• Sports
• school events
• school facilities (playground & equipment, gym, hall etc.)

or aspects of their community such as:

• famous landmarks or people from the town
• housing
• out-of-school clubs we participate in
• events during the year
• our favourite places etc.

This could include photos and writing and be added to the blog of one of the children in their group. Reading through the twin school blogs as a class could lead to questions or comments being generated which would then be added to the comments section.

• Art Exchange Project:

Communicate through drawing and works of art. Themes could include families, school, living environments, homeland etc. Topics could include ”Meet My Family”, ”Meet My Friends and Visit My School”, “My Home City”, “Summer Fun”, “School Animals”, “Merry Christmas”. Take photos and publish pupils’ works in the community gallery. When the project is over, the best pieces of work could be sent to the partner school for an art exhibition.

Watch out for

Forums can be moderated by clicking on the cogs. You may want to ensure that the administrator, teachers and community leaders are able to moderate. Comment boxes on front pages of communities are set to be moderated by default.

The one area that cannot be moderated is children posting comments on other children’s blogs, and sending emails. This will need to be closely monitored by teachers or administrators for any possible behaviour breaches.

Other types of twinning projects:

School Transition twinnings: to ease the move to a new school.

International Twinnings: exchanges with schools abroad. We sometimes have schools abroad who would like to carry out an exchange with a school in the UK. Please contact us if you would like some more details.