"How did the e-twinning project benefit to teach the lessons?" by Mutlu HASPOLAT

As a teacher of English Language, I have never had a chance to teach another language which even I, myself barely know. I am talking about Latin. The first time I came across with the language was in our Twinspace. I downloaded the Latin Language Notes of Marta Pena who is also another language (Latin) teacher. The most interesting thing about this experience is I am both learning and teaching, or let's say my students and me are teaching and learning at the same time. It is really fun and enjoyable.
The Project Ancient Rome in Your Modern Town gave us the opportunity of sharing our teaching and learning experiences. Before starting this great project, my students had no idea about Romans. Although our country (Turkiye) was founded in the midst of the Roman Towns, they didn't know that all those ruins belonged to Romans at once. Now, along with the knowledge of our local Roman towns, they know what Romans used to eat, wear, believe, sing and listen... They also will cook and taste some of the Roman meals in one of the coming weeks.
This project also taught us about other countries' backgrounds and we made many new friends. We saw where our friends live and what kind of beauties their lands embody.
The best thing about the project is my students who are not very well on languages are eager to learn new languages and interested in the history more. The way that they follow at school is really different when compared with their past. They are more enthusiastic about searching and getting the knowledge. They like spending time in the project and they say that it feels great.
In Turkiye, the students address their teachers with their first names plus "teacher", like "Mutlu teacher". It sounds interesting that they accept Marta (who sends our monthly Latin Documents and writes a lot in the blog) as one of their teachers and they call her "Marta Teacher ". They liked Spain's the power point presentation about St. Valentine's Day (which was in Latin). They used Google translation to learn what the pages tell.
They also enjoyed with the other PPTs about Roman Gods and beliefs. They really enjoyed the story about Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. Their English is not enough to understand the story and I translated most of the story for them in our weekly project meeting. One should have seen their excitement in their eyes while we were translating the text sentence by sentence about who would Paris choose to give the apple. At the end, they clapped Aphrodite for taking the apple. It was really fun. Such kind of activities, which are not compulsory highly motivates them. It also seems so eccentric to them. I observed that the students who take part in our e twinning project study their English lessons more and they always do their English homework.
Shortly and briefly, they know more about Ancient Romans, Romania, Bulgaria, and Spain. They feel great to prepare themselves for the next month’s tasks although their English is not so good. We are all happy to share our experiences with our friends from other countries and spend time to teach and learn with them.
Mutlu HASPOLAT

Turkiye