Author: Adriana Lefter

Stories, fairytales are one of the learning ways of children since they are young, they come into contact with life experiences, emotions, find themselves in these experiences and learn. If parents or grandparents were reading at first, when they learn the alphabet students can read by themselves to gain new knowledge, to exercise new skills and abilities and to develop new skills. We learnt to do this together with students and teachers from other 4 countries participating into an Erasmus Project Soft Skills for a better life.

Using the text Lars and the Husky puppy, students found the way to learn about the Universe, planet Earth, Continents and Poles, animals and inhabitants.

Even though the main characters of the texts were a polar bear and a husky puppy, it helped us a lot to research the life of the North Pole. Using the Scientix resource on MOST UNCOMMON ARCTIC ANIMALS the students thus discovered the not at all a simple life the animals are living.

Moreover, together we studied the solar system, built it from recyclable materials, then using worksheets, online tools, learned about the continents, mostly focusing on the North Pole. The students read about it in the encyclopedias, on the Internet and then together we selected the most important information about the climate, the climate change and its impact on the life of North Poll, in particular, the affect on the glaciers that are melting faster now.

It was impressive to find out how the animals from North Poll were adapted to live at that temperature, and we experienced this using fat and ice cubes. Students could feel how fat protects the body from the very cold winter. Playing and learning was a pleasurable experience for the children.

While reading the text Lars and the Husky puppy, I let the students identify solutions to accommodate them both on a cold night. Their ideas were ingenious, full of creativity – they decided to build an igloo. They collaborated, exchanged ideas and communicated effectively in the group, made the drawing and then built igloos using sugar cubes, recyclable materials, marshmellow.

It was a good opportunity to discuss the characteristics of a literary and non-literary text and using Story cubes students wrote very creative and funny texts.
These texts made us discuss about climate change and send a message to everyone. For that made a TV shows, covering this topic.