new learning strategies - involving experts

I would like to share with you some of our new experiences. We talked here together with you about the importance (and sometimes the difficulties) of motivation, and new kind of activities. It is a very special experience if our pupils and we, teachers enjoy together the lesson.

This time I read a book about the "flow" at school from Prof. Csíkszentmihályi. I found his book very interesting. He defines flow as "the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it"

I like try out new kind of activities. I think, international projects give us many possibilities. We partecipate in eTwinning and in Comenius programme as well. And, together with our partners had great adventures.

In one of our eTwinning projects (BE TWIN! - Twinning up the everyday lesson) we work together with our Italian friends.
The project helps me a lot as a teacher to motivate my pupils to study Italian language.
During our last Italian lessons we talked about the "restaurant", which is an important topic in every languages. This time I tried to choose a new kind of activity to motvate my pupils.

The gastronomy is a part of culture. If we have more knowledge about it, we can know more about the lifestyle in Italy, where our friends live.
The new words help us to develope the key competencies (communication in a foreign language), and help us to have new information.
If pupils can try out what we learned in a natural/practical situation it is very helpful in the learning process.
So..what we did? After we learned in the classroom the most important words, we asked experts to help us.

Our experts:
1. Dott. Alessandro Rosselli ( University of Szeged)
2. Zsolt Karda - proprietary of an Italian restaurant in our town.

We visited the restaurant, my pupils had some "role-plays" as waitress and guests, after we had a lesson in the cuisine :), and learned about the cooking of Italian "pasta", when my pupils asked our experts. After? We ate what we cooked as well :).

We enjoyed a lot the activities, and I am sure, my pupils were motivated.
You can see the results too (it's true in Italian and Hungarian languages), because one of my colleagues, Tapodiné Atlasz Marianna registered everything with a videocamera.

Hope, you like it).
Hugs, Mónika