Project Day in V. Myto

Our Project Day was an important part of the whole project - it took part on 17th October 2014 but there were a lot of pre-activities and also a lot of follow-up activities. You can find out more in the twinspace of our project. Here you can see a few of them.

Lecture in the Museum - 10/10/2014

On Friday the 10th of October we set forth with my class into our local museum in Vysoké Mýto. We heard out very interesting information about World War I to be later used in our eTwinning project. The First World War touched Vysoké Mýto as well. From the second half of 18th century Vysoké Mýto served as barracks for a military post. The period before WWI was in a sign of peace and nobody had an idea what was about to come. Vysoké Mýto awaited a mobilisation. Soldiers and even horses were being brought to Vysoké Mýto. Some time later trains were consecutively bringing hurt soldiers and Vysoké Mýto became one big hospital. Schools and other buildings were rebuilt and changed so that the patients could survive their injuries there. “Only” 160 people died here in Vysoké Mýto by the time of all the WWI. After the lecture we visited an exposition of weaponry. Only a few weapons come down in Vysoké Mýto from WWI; most of them were confiscated or depreciated. (text by Filip P., student of kvarta)

In Flander Fields - 17/10/2014

The first lesson of the WWI project day was English. The students of KVARTA were divided into two groups as usual and worked with their English teachers. In one of the two groups the students found out about the origins of the tradition of wearing red or white poppies on the coats on 11^th November. They watched a short video about the Remembrance Day in Britain in 2013, then they read about the poem In Flanders Fields in Wikipedia and in the end they listened to the song of the same name. The teacher also shared her experience about her visit to some WWI cemeteries in France with crosses in rows and rows. In the end a Czech website vets.cz was introduced. In the other group the students were in the IT room and worked on their own looking up key words in texts about WWI. Then the teacher wrote the key words on the board and all the students learnt them.

Chemical weapons - 17/10/2014

On Friday 17th October the KVARTA class (students aged 14-15) had an unusual  chemistry lesson - their chemistry and physics teacher, who is also their form teacher, Alena Pecinová, had prepared a special class on chemical weapons in wars, with the focus on the First World War. I entered the classroom and planned to stay just for a few minutes as I wanted to take some photos. However, the teacher´s lecture was so interesting and catching that I couldn´t help staying all 45 minutes. Also the students, who are usually very talkative and sometimes even not very concentrated, were listening all the time with great concern, even if the narrating and photos were sometimes rather tough. Some of the photos were then used in a presentation and one of the students added subtitles to the slides so you can read it
and partly experience the wonderful lesson too.

Songs in the war - 17/10/2014

On the WWI project day (Friday 17^th October) KVARTA class had an extra lesson of music. At the beginning the music teacher explained about the role of music and songs in the war when the soldiers both often sang when they were marching or they sang just for pleasure during their free time, remembering their girlfriends and families. Then the students brainstormed some Czech folk songs with the topic of war. In the second part of the lesson they learnt to sing Tipperary. First they learnt to read the lyrics, then two girls played the tune on flutes and then the pupils sang the song. In the end they decided to try singing and marching and so they set off the music classroom into the school corridor. One or two disturbed teachers who ran out of their classrooms, told us off but it was fun.

Poppy workshop - 17/10/2014

The fourth lesson of the WWI project day was fine arts. Each student had to create their own poppy from fabric so that they could wear them on coats on 11^th November. First the teacher explained the safety rule as they were going to work with lit candles. Then she gave the students detailed instructions how to make the poppies step by step. The students then cut round shapes from fabrics of various shades of red or purple colour, scorched the edges, stitched them together and stitched a few matching beads in the middle. In the end they stitched a pin on the underside. All of them (both the girls and the boys) were very handy and skilful and their final products looked awesome. Some of them pinned then proudly on their clothes.

Books about WWI - 17/10/2014

The last lesson of the WWI project day was literature. However, we didn´t have a usual lesson in the classroom – we went to the local library where the librarian had prepared a lecture about various Czech books about the First World War (all of them on the shelves of the library so ready to be lent). There were about twenty of them and they came from various periods – some of them written soon after the war (one of those is probably the most famous one “The Good Soldier Švejk” by J. Hašek), others written recently even if they are based on old authentic soldiers´ diaries. The librarian knew so much about the books and their authors – it was amazing. However, after the lecture we agreed that it was rather difficult to remember all the interesting facts – so maybe we will rather read a book or two about WWI on our own.

War monuments - presentation
and quiz

Quite a few students from our school don´t come straight from town of Vysoké Mýto or Choceň but they commute to school from nearby villages. In many of these villages there are World War I Memorials built by the citizens of the village in early 1920s.  They are often situated in the village green or another important place (e.g. close to the Community House or the school) and they show the feelings of the people who lost their dears in the war. When looking for these memorials, we found  a very useful Czech website (www.vets.cz) with lists of these monuments district by district. So far we have managed to visit twenty of them and we took a lot of photos. It was interesting to read the names – sometimes two or three surnames on the particular memorial were the same as they were probably family. It was touching to imagine that some mothers lost two or even three sons or a husband and a son / sons.

War monuments - THINGLINK map

Besides creating a presentation about the World War I monuments in the surrounding villages (the students were working as a team and they made a GOOGLE presentation), they also used part of the information and created an attractive THINGLINK map accompanied with a LEARNINGAPPS quiz. It is available here for you, too.