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Istituto Comprensivo Via Ferraironi a.s. 2012 - 2013

COMENIUS Project Urban Kids Tribes - Final event Rome May 24th 2012 Paola A.: This is the Urban Kids Tribes Comenius Project final event. The project has meant the partnership of seven different schools belonging to some of the European Union nations. The school who joined in the project shared the aim to build common background as for the Ideal City.

We all come from different cities from the EU, seven of them, nearly all of which are the country's Capital.

Rome as the capital of Italy....

Signs: I dream of a city where..everything is made to the size of the children's needs and hopes.

PaolaA.: The pupils are here today in order to complete an activity regarding the City that has been going on since 2010.

Pupil 1: We are children from the fifth year, section A and as my friend was saying we are drawing the parts of the project that we enjoyed most.

Paola A. : IN two years time the pupils explored their own area, their own town, discovering which parts they did enjoy together with the ones that they disliked.They have been observing and noticing things and facts that we, as adults, weren't able to see anymore. The children have worked a lot at the exchanging of their ideas, among the classes, within each school and among the partner schools throughout Europe. There has been plenty of manual work, building, gathering, transforming of materials which have been manipulated by all of them.

Pupil 2: This Tshirt has been given to me and to us by our pen pals from Paris. They bought a white Tshirt and then they wrote all their names on it. This is my friend Edward's signature..

Paola A.: There have been cultural visits and exchanges, the pupils and their teachers have travelled from one nation to the other, bringing with them plans and ideas gathered together. And now it is the time when all of them meet in one place to

get to the point: How is it built our Ideal City? What does it have to have to be special to us?

Pupil 3 and 4: 3- I am a journalist. How is it like your Ideal City?

4- My ideal city contains flying cars and very big buildings. There must be a lot of space and means of transport that do not pollute the air...and many other more things..

Eva E.: The children from all the seven cities have been exploring their own city and also looking at other cities in Europe that we are working with. They have been looking at what is good and bad in their city and thinking in detail about what they would like to put into an ideal city. And today this final meeting, the children representing all the cities are working in groups, workshops and discussing what they have been learning and they are going to put together their ideas and make an amazing ideal city. So we are looking forward to see this final product, celebrating the children coming together from the seven european partner cities.

Paola A.: This project is based on the digital platform called TWINSPACE, a space which is the key for the european teachers to exchange their materials, artifacts and ideas related to teaching. Teachers get to know each other online, by means of uploading materials related to the project which have been realized and worked on in the classrooms. We have been using one large digital space within the technical opportunities we had been given. It is a Web 2.0 level activity. We have shared and uploaded different materials and we have been working all at the same pace on the same structure.

Pupil 1: From the 7th to the 11th of May we have been to Paris as a school trip abroad.

Pupil 5: We are now trying to draw all the things we have enjoyed best in this Comenius Project.

Pupil 1: The Louvre, the Tour Eiffel, Matisse, the Gioconda , all these things...

Eva E.: Comenius project for the children coming from the United Kingdom have had now the opportunity to learn things that they wouldn't have probably had the opportunity to learn in a normal school curriculum. So the project has been an amazing experience for them and it has given them the opportunity to learn about the cultures and the diversity of our world. We have brought to the children the outside world maybe they may never get an opportunity to experience, countries that they may never visit but they have had now the experience of seeing either through the eyes of the teachers who have been to the meetings...

English pupil 1: It was important to me because I can improve my language a little bit and speak to a lot of people.

English pupil 2: It is important to me because whilst we are all building it we are also making friends and meeting new people and communicating with each people from different countries.

English pupil (boy): It is important because we get to know different cultures and different languages and different countries and we talk to them and learn to be friendly with them.

English pupil 2: The thing I like about the Ideal city is that it has got different buildings from each country. It is like bringing all the cultures from around the world into one little city of our own.

Teacher (male): The best thing I like about the Ideal city is that the children have made it so it sees the city from the view of the children, which I think is very important and the adults have taken a step back from the city and the children have designed.....and how to make it and how should be there and why it should be there, and that's to me is the best thing about the Ideal city.

Patrizia D'A.: I am the Comenius UKT project coordinator for the Paris's Italian school Leonardo da Vinci. I am one of the founders of the project since we had been working in an international setting right from the start. Our little school in Paris is an international setting as for the two languages already in use, French and Italian. By means of this project we got to work together with some European schools we had formerly had a collaborative activity with and we have also improved our long standing relationship with the Italian Primary school Iqbal Masih.

The project started up last year with the exploring of the beautiful town of Paris, a sort of activity we have already tried out since ours is a very tiny school and its restricted space has meant that in the years we have always been out in the streets, in the ateliers and other various city areas, teachers and pupils, in order to learn from the real world.

Samuele: My name is Samuele, I come from the Italian school Leonardo da Vinci in Paris and I am an Ambassador in Rome for the Comenius project. We have just about finished to set up the Eiffel Tower.

Italian pupil (girl): I am very much enjoying this project because I like the writing of letters and getting to know the children of Europer by means of the video conferences.

Teacher (female): It is quite interesting because people can meet all the other children of Europe and it is based on the culture and not only on the economy, the european economy so this is the interesting part of the project that the children can meet the other children from Europe and that they can concentrate on their culture

and on the cultural aspects of Europe.

Child: I am working with the group of transport that means that we are inventing or imagining other inventions of means of transport as this one that my frien made (translated in Italian as well); we are building some means of transport, for instance this is the flying car, the running turtle, the artificial volcanoes, the magic bubble and the Aladdin rug. We have also started up writing to each other, to one particular friend at a time, and becoming pen pals. My pen pal is Michele.

Michele: My name is Michele, I am from Rome, I enjoyed this project very much, we exchanged letters with everyone else and we had a lot of fun.

Ceida: I am Ceida from Izmir, Turkey. We got involved in the project two years ago and we are very happy having been involved in this project because I think that our students and our teachers benefited from it a lot. It was an interesting voyage because at the start our students had some information about the cities but it was different to go and see the city itself, we had some student exchange programmes, integrated in the project as well. We are hoping to come to a consesus about what an Ideal city should look like: free time activities, cultural events, how should the buildings look like, how should the transports be like, how about health care, what about people, how can they be happier and healthier in an Ideal city.

Teacher (Spanish): Even if this project has been developped and carried out towards very ambitious and large expectations, I believe all in all that its most important part lays in the relationships that the children have built with each other. Basically children get to know their city because of their school work, it sounds funny but that's the way it is. We have made it possible for the children to visit very many parts of the city: parks, museums, factories, shops, etc. and in this way the children build up a general vision but a deep one too, about the city they live in. In fact, their fathers who are very busy working and because of other difficulties, are not able to take them around the city. Whereas the children are very much interested in this subject. The project is about the future, we are anticipating the city of the future, the one that they will want to build. One thing that I will always remember and cherish is the visit we received by the Iqbal Masih pupils. It has gone on for fourfive days in which the children got on very well together, using a bit of Spanish, English and Italian, they have understood each other and I believe that this is the great thing about the project in these not easy times.

Paola A.: The children have given us answers which go well beyond all our best expectations.

Michele: The most important thing of this project is, in my view, meeting all together and think out about the rights and the wrongs of what is going on in our cities.

Paola A.: Usually projects, especially european ones, start off with great ideas and expectations. In fact, this time we had started off with a very straightforward, easy project to share. Then we got to this stage when we had to organize an incredibly large meeting of children and teachers all working on the same subject, which they do know very well. They have all been active at any stage of the project. In fact having asked them what a town is like has meant asking them about their own identity as citizens of the future.

Pupil 1: The town has very many ugly things: pollution, violence, and many other things like the traffic.

Pupil 2: There also are many people who go around bullying the others, possibly breaking things, games or simply annoying the others.

Pupil 3: Less violence in the cities, people get killed.

Pupil 4: There are very many beautiful things. There are many parks.

Giorgia: It has been real fun to build up this city. It has been fun to draw, the teachers told us to draw the Constantino Arch, the Coliseum.

VIDEO 2 Pupil (green shirt) – The subject we worked on mostly is pollution. We thought about building cars that wouldn't run on the streets but would fly, cars that wouldn't move with petrol but by using the solar energy, with the solar panels' energy. Our class has been asked to work on this idea.

Paola Arduini: When we ask our pupils how they imagine their ideal town to be, they start off talking about streets, spaces, green areas, playgrounds but then again they very quickly shift to talking about civilization, the ways of living, the ways people live their spaces in their town, they talk about differences and poverty, poor people in the streets and happy people, social inequalities, who holds the power. We have received so many interesting reflections on these subject within the groups. At the moment we are gathering all the ideas and we are sharing them all together.

(In the event): We still have forgotten one thing, the name of our city: there is a proposal. Do you have a proposal? Come here and tell us about it.

Susanna Serpe: Now the children will tell us their choice about the city's name.

Children all together: The name is PRISMA. P for Paris, R for Rome, I for Izmir, S

for Stockholm, M for Madrid, A for Athens.

Paola Arduini: Prisma is something that brings out colours reflecting the sun rays and gives a lot of colours and our cities are so full of colours, so...it's such an idea Group Three, free time and leisure, Group Four culture, Group Five people, there are many things together, Group Six transports, Group Seven building and Group Eight communication.

Now, all the leaders, the speakers from each group are going to come here to explai, I think in Italian and in English if they can.

Pupil group speaker 1: We thought of a building in which the children can go and enjoy art, music and concerts. The building will also be a place where to enjoy theatre and films in cinemas. We think that free time is not only about playing outside but playing together and along with, and form the school's art language which is over there.

Italian pupil: In our ideal city there shouldn't be barriers for people who have any kind of problem. Rich people should donate money to those in need.

Susanna Serpe: The peculiar fact is that some want very big gardens and very big buildings and schools, while some others want very small schools, small gardens but very crowded gardens, with lions..there it is, some of us wanted lions in it!

Italian Pupil (girl): We found a problem in Energy: in some countries there is nuclear energy and we have decided to substitute it with solar energy, energy coming from water and from wind.

Urbanist, Dr. : I would like to tell you that what you have been doing here is something related to a very ancient feeling that has always gone around in Man's History, so good enough that you have been spending the past three years working on such a deep subject with friends coming from all over the world, you'll see that you have this feeling inside yourselves. The beauty, the willingness to enable everyone to feel well, as you said before in your presentation “This city is made in such a way that it makes everyone feels good�, this willingness has always been around in the History of mankind. Together with this willingness there is another one in the Man's heart, the will to buil, buil build..If this city would have been built by grown ups like me, they would have filled it with concrete, skyscrapers, concrete and skyscrapers..

I would like to show you a suggestion I found in the web site. There was a drawing by a girl, I remember it, she said, in her writing, that in that city, in the park there should be a space where people could sleep in the open air. Here you are, this is a bit of the Ideal City!

Simonetta Salacone: I have come here with great pleasure as the teachers have

invited me and I also believe that when children speak we should listen to them with great attention since they often say very wise things. Children are our future and also the future of the Thought. And considering all that Europe is going through, if it listened to the children, possibly it would manage to work it out.

A very beautiful thing that the EU has done, and let's hope that it will remain as united as it is meant to be, is carrying out these cultural exchange projects as the Comenius, the Erasmus, which give us the opportunity to meet, as ordinary people, not only the Heads of State when they meet in the G8 in the important uppermost leaders do. They never solve anything, whereas when we meet as people, as citizens of our towns we know hat we talk about things we all have inside ourselves, common feelings of ordinary people. The EU must invent a suitable place to live in for everyone of us, adults and children. It is necessary that children are made to know that they will be the ones to build a future, a new world, I don't only mean Europe, a world able to discover its need, able to build them. We must not delegate the experts to do it. It isn't true that the cities must be built by the expert, the professionals, the economy must be dealt with by them: the expert professionals must translate the need and the wills of the populations...

The urbanist: I would like to say goodbye wishing you the best success with all my heart, since you have in these three years developped the most beautiful part within the Human being, and do make a treasure of it since it is not a matter of age, it is something that stays throughout our life: I'd like to tell you this by reading the words of a great Poet who should now be ninety-two, Andrea Zanzotto. He says: “I am convinced of the fact that the world ruling class has stopped at the pre-geologic era”, which means before the Dynosaurs Era, “to them the real does not exist, only enterprise is real, but Nature doesn't bear with this. To defend the landscape” the Poet says “means to defend the beauty of Nature, the beauty of life”. This is the wish I want to leave with you, dear children.

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