ICAN SCHOOL

Multinational meeting
in Bratislava

Dear friends,
we are reporting to you again and we have good news! Our project aimed at creating Slovak textbooks for children has reached its goal. On the penultimate day of May, we met all the partners working on the project at our school iCan and took stock.
We remembered everything we have gone through in the period from September 2019 until now while working on the project. It has been a challenging period. A pandemic of unprecedented proportions has struck the entire world and has affected our project. We have not been able to carry out our working meetings as planned. Work activities went online. But we kept on working. Then an even worse thing came to Europe - war. It changed the lives of many people and affected their destinies severely. But there was something positive in it. Human solidarity and a desire to help. Many Ukrainian mothers with children started to come to Slovakia. They came and still come to our schools and kindergartens and together with Slovak children they try to communicate with each other. Our project and the textbooks that were created with the support of the project are more needed now than ever.
All of this was heard at our last review meeting at the end of May. Our foreign partners also came. They gave us invaluable feedback in the process of developing the textbooks when they were tested in the learning centres. From Birmingham came Ms. Dagmar Smalley, from Dublin Ms. Lucia Shefchikova and Ms. Marcela Libichova, from Paris Ms. Kristina Rakic, who also came on behalf of Ms. Betka de la Bouvrie, who was unable to attend. Ms. Janka Píšová came from the State Pedagogical Institute and the author teams were represented by Ms. Klaudia Bachkai. Of course, our graphic designer Ms. Haberova, project coordinator Ms. Tunegova and last but not least the school founder Ms. Kurotova were not missing.

The meeting had a reflective and informal tone. It was opened by Ms. Tunegova, evaluated the implementation of the project. She underlined what we have achieved and reminded what we still have to work on in the end. She evaluated all our project meetings, of which there were five during the project. Three of them were held virtually due to the pandemic. However, this did not detract from their quality. Through the computer monitor we got to know Birmingham, Dublin and Paris, as well as the partner educational centres where dedicated Slovak teachers teach children with Slovak roots the native language of their parents - Slovak. We learned how these children react in Slovak lessons and also how they manage to work with our textbooks Aha, Slovak!, Slovak at School or The World Around Us in Slovak.

During the project, the school also organised a number of webinars where we presented the textbooks and supplementary teaching material to a wide range of professionals. The interest in the webinars was high, especially the first two were attended by more than 50 teachers from Slovak and foreign schools or other educational institutions.

Our partners from abroad also spoke at the meeting. In their presentations they focused on the process of textbook testing and evaluated it. They did not forget about the "tidbits" from the testing. As one of the authors of the textbook Aha, Slovak! was also present, the debate started and the exchange of knowledge and experience could continue undisturbed.

There was also a common toast and a wish for our textbooks to do well. May they be a help to children and their teachers. Finally, we took a photo together and wished them success in their new project, which we have recently started together and which is closely related to the creation of textbooks.

We wish you a nice summer and a lot of joy and enthusiasm with Aha, Slovak!
And discover the world around us in Slovak.

Our whole project team wishes you the best.