What can you do at your school?

Why celebrate Europe Day at all?

To arrange a Europe Day celebration or activity on 9th May or even during the whole week could help raise awareness and stimulate a debate about Europe and what it means to your pupils as well as your colleagues. It could come as the beginning or conclusion of projects the children will work on or worked on recently or help focus on areas such as multilingualism, cultural diversity, citizenship or history on which you want to put stronger emphasis.

Celebrating Europe Day

• could increase your pupils knowledge of Europe (the Passport to the European Union" will hopefully be of assistance here)
• raise their awareness of Europe's cultural diversity and how this benefits us all http://www.interculturaldialogue2008.eu/ .
• improve their skills at communicating with Europeans from other countries through better understanding of our differences and even by developing language skills and use them.

How could you celebrate 9th May at your school:

• Arrange a language cafe - taster lessons, lectures and competitions about language.
• Organise an exhibition about countries where your school has partners or encourage small groups in your class to research a member state and then present their findings to the rest.
• Choose a team sport for ex. "Eurobasketball" and arrange a European tournament where groups of pupils play as the different member states, they can even dress up in team colours and encourage their supporters to wave "their" flags. Europe will always be the winner.
• Try to find the recipies for the dishes mentioned in the passport or other European delicacies and try if your pupils with the support for their parents can cook them, bring everything to school to have a real European buffet, maybe invite another class. Maybe your school cantine may wish to cooperate.
• Encourage your foreign pupils to tell the others about their country or invite pupils who have lived abroad with their parents to share their thoughts with the others.
• Exhibit information about studying and working abroad and invite young people who have studied or worked abroad to tell about their experiences.
• Run a creative competition for the best postcard or poster showing European diversity.
• Film studio: Show movies (fiction or documentary) from different countries, maybe even in the original language. Language institutes such as Goethe Institut, Institut français etc. or even the cultural departments of the embassies could be good starting points to lay your hands on some suitable films.
• Invite performers from a city you have a partnership with.
• Organise an exhibition of books and magazines from other countries at the school library.
• Choose a topic currently debated in the press and compare the articles in the British press to other European newspapers.
• Find out if there are representatives of other European Member States for ex. Honorary Consuls of EU embassies, tourist offices etc, in your area and let the children try to collect some stamps on the backpages of the passport, the children could also take the passport on holiday with them and try to convince the officers at the airport passportcontrols to give them a stamp in their "passport".