Our project was a bilateral cooperation of Secondary School Nr. 2 from Racibórz, Poland and the Budapest XIV. Kerületi Hunyadi János Általános Iskola. Racibórz and Zugló (XIV. Kerület) are twin cities with very good relationships. The Polish school contacted the Hungarian one in 2010. The secondary school’s major is P. E. and this is the reason why they wanted to cooperate with Hunyadi in the distinct fields of music.
After preparation we started our two year long common work sponsored by the Comenius Program of the European Union which lasted from September 2012. to July 2014. The name of the project is „Brothers in music”. Our aim was to gather knowledge about the music, culture, history and language of the partner nation. The working language of the project is English.At the beginning of the school year the students, the parents and the teachers were informed about the aims of the project and the means of their realization.
Suitable logos were designed by the students. PowerPoint presentations connecting to the project in various aspects were made. With these activities we tried to get the basic idea of our cooperation closer to our students, as well as the most important knowledge about our fellow country, on the other hand we wanted to involve IT into a basically music project.
Accordingly we created a display describing our twin city. There was a day of music in both schools in two different aspects: the Polish partner organized a specific “Day of Hungarian songs” while the Hungarians celebrated the “World day of music” in which additional attention was payed to Polish music. This difference is on purpose: the Polish partner does concrete project activities as they lack musical traditions; Hunyadi, as a partly music school, have many traditions, which were accommodated to the aims of the project. The two alternate views of musical education are typical of the whole project. One of our main points is to learn from each other on this subject. In our point of view this procedure was done in the right way: the Hungarian folk and classical music orientated musical education met the Polish one focusing on children who like singing in a very interesting way. This was rather spectacular in the common concerts during the project meeting in Racibórz and Budapest. In both cities the audience could see a real celebration of music. We sang in each other’s language, altogether we used five language . The concert programs had small differences at the two places mainly because we wanted two show both audiences what we got at the same way.
A trilingual professional musical dictionary was produced in Polish, Hungarian and English in three different order to make looking anything up easier. Language development went further when all students (and teachers) participated in compulsory language lessons about the partner’s language. The knowledge we got was used several times, however our language use, because of the difficulties of both languages, remained on the level of everyday gestures like greetings. Still a new language with totally unknown structure, pronunciation, different characters was a new experience even at a low level for our students.
Now let's write about the project meeting in Racibórz between 12. 04. 2013. and 21. 04., when Hungarian 6th to 8th graders from Hunyadi’s Grand Choir participated, and the second visit, which was in Budapest between 18. 10. 2013. and 27. 10. At both occasions we had a visit at the local council who also helped us during our stay. We thank them for their hospitality.
The meetings had several goals. Our general aims were to get knowledge about the culture, history, sights, language, attitude and other features of our partner nation.
The specific goal was to get knowledge about the musical culture and education of music at school of the other nation. We presume these goals were reached using the present opportunities.
We accomplished several activities together with the local school's students. We managed to get to know their school (most interestingly the Polish way of integrated education and Hungarian music teaching), we did common art, sports and entertainment activities. Our students were hosted by local families. During all these things the children were forced to use their foreign language knowledge. Their communication skills developed according to the opinion of all of them.
In Poland we left Racibórz several times and made trips to places like Wroclaw and Krakow, which are part of World Heritage. In Hungary we focused only on Budapest. At the end of both meetings we left crying and laughing at the same time.
Comenius photos - Hungary (.ZIP file) Comenius photos - Poland (.ZIP file)
