ETwinning project - festivities in Poland

Today we have watched the Polish presentations in class. They are all different and incredible. We cannot do anything but praise them both for their layout and their content. We have learnt a lot about Poland, how similar and how different we are:

• The 1st of May is a holiday here but not many people celebrate it. For most people (unless you're involved in politics) it's just a holiday before the final exams. So it's great for studying a bit. Besides ,the weather is usually good and some years you can already go to the beach. We don't feel identified with the marches and demonstrations. This presentations let us realise that most of us don't really think of it a "workers' day".
• Teachers' Day was my favourite because I'm a teacher. I cannot imagine having a day for being proud of being a teacher, and even less for students giving me a present. My students even laughed at the idea. I told them that I might move to Poland. Definitely my favourite.
• Independence Day. For my students it sounded like the title of a film. We were all surprised to see that yours is such a young country, because Spain was a Roman province and has been a country since the Middle Ages. Many of the students didn't really like the historical part as they don't know much about European history. However, the presentation was very good.
• Women's Day. We also celebrate here as it's an international festivity but nobody knew the exact date. Sometimes we show a film or mention it in class but it isn't as important as it seems to be for Poles. Another reason to move to Poland!!
• New Year's Eve shows a festivity which is very similar in Spain. We don't go to bed that night (we sleep the next morning or afternoon) and eat twelve grapes at midnight but the rest is very similar.  In some cities they also have fireworks, but not here. The presentation was very good.
• The Patron Saint of your school was funny as we don't have patron saints in schools as religion is no longer connected with official society. Villages have patron saints but schools are named after writers or painters (such as ours, Tino Grandío). Besides your patron saint's name is unreadable for us.
• World War II is much more serious and historically interesting. Our history teacher said she might use it in class in June (when ESO-4 students are going to study this historical period). We didn't suffer the war as Spain had just left its own Civil War but we know how much your country suffered at that time. In fact, some Spanish republicans joined the French resistance and died in concentration camps in Poland. Most of our students didn't know about that.

As you can see we worked a lot and probably some of the students in our school will write their own comments in the next few days at the Twinspace. It was also interesting to see that their pen pals were the authors of these presentations.
Congratulations to our Polish partners!