Presentation of Slovene contribution in ENO program 2001/02

Solkan Primary School was chosen to take part in ENO program in the school year 2001/02. We want to present all the participants of the conference what we did, experienced, liked and learned about it. Above all we would like to thank Mika for his guidance and support and all the partners for their contributions and information. we learned a lot concerning the topics, the use of the learning environment ENO and relationships.

From the very beginning students from grade 8, who find English very interesting and fun, worked on the program hard and helped younger schoolmates from our school by translating and researching certain topics. Our big support were our participating teachers and the headmaster. We would like to thank them all for their help and co-operation.

Now let us present our work. We met once a week and discussed and prepared our materials. The first theme was The place we live. Each of the 22 students wrote an article about school, home and place, and included it in ENO materials. We compared our descriptions with others by reading and discussing the materials. During this theme we got acquainted  with physical and social environment of all participating schools. We learned how to use ENO modules, like diary, chat, ENO materials, discussions etc. We also found out most things about the participating schools and asked for an E-pal.

Our next theme was This is our nature, which we handled in November. During this interesting theme we learned a lot about forests near ENO schools. We discussed how far the forests are from our schools, how big they are and for what purpose they are used (economy, sport, relax). We are lucky to be at school which is situated next to a forest.

Our next theme was Our culture and nature. We researched forest Panovec and we analyzed uses of paths and areas for recreation around Solkan and Nova Gorica. We did a research of trees and took photos for ENO program. Our researches faced three directions; purpose, realization, proposals of people. The group of students made a wide research project and presented it to the others. We presented different types of forests and trees, forest hazard, pollution, hunting and economy of forests. Slovenian forests were presented also by our minister Mr Kopač.

The most important and wide theme for us was Sustainable development. We started it with Paper research. Students from grade five in co-operation with our teacher of craft researched how much paper we use at school. Eight graders gathered information about paper from different sources, specially on Internet. Students from grade five tried to recycle paper and we also prepared an interactive test about the topic. Students from grade six worked on water consumption. They researched how and how much water is used at our school. They took pictures of the biggest  water consumption at our school to have clearer image of them. At the end we wrote a general report about spending water. The theme Energy was also very important. Students from grade eight gathered all important data, presented energy in general, did a research about consumption of energy, found out the biggest users at school, presented the sources of energy and also went on excursion to hydroelectric power station.

Our last theme was from the world of music and art This is our culture. We presented our anthem and folk song Happy shepherd. A group of students from grade eight sang the two mentioned songs and recorded them. We sent both songs to ENO programme as mp3 files.

As we wanted our classmates, parents and other people in Slovenia to be informed well about ENO program we decided to build a special website (http://www2.arnes.si/~osngso3s/eno_project/eno_project.htm) about the program in Slovene and English language. We presented our work to the staff at school, our local media (local TV and newspapers, eSchola chat) and finally we were invited to present it also at the national level in Ljubljana .

We were happy to invite Mr Vanhanen Mika to talk about it at our international conference MIRK in Piran.

Prepared by Sanja Gorjan, 8A