Representatives from St Francis School, Victoria, Gozo, recently joined teachers from Sicily, Poland and Slovakia in Vajnory, Bratislava, for a meeting of the Comenius project Unity in Diversity which is looking at relations between society on the one hand and the elderly, people with special needs and refugees on the other.

At the meeting, the project partners shared experiences, noted how topics were tackled in the respective countries and discussed the results so far from the three-year project. Over the past few months, pupils at Gozitan school pupils have written poems, short stories, plays, designed posters and slogans about these three social categories, which were displayed in the school corridors at Parents' Day.

During the forthcoming months the school will be holding a 'Grandparents' Day' whereby grandparents of the children will be invited to spend a day at school. The aim of the event is to instill love and respect towards the elderly.

Other proposals are for the pupils to spend a day in a wheelchair or blindfolded to make them aware of problems encountered by blind or wheelchair-bound persons, and to organise 'Games without Frontiers' that will involve the pupils competing in a number of sporting events with foreign pupils, students with special needs from the Sannat Special Unit, and elderly persons.

The Gozitan school is participating in the project with the help of finanacial support from the European Commission lifelong learning programmes.

Meanwhile, pupils from Mtarfa Primary School, which forms part of St Nicholas College, have been conducting visits around Mtarfa and the surrounding areas of Chadwick Lakes, Ta' Qali, Rabat, Mdina, and Buskett as part of the school's participation in the Comenius project 'Our Culture, our Environment' pupils.

The information gathered during these visits, combined with artwork produced by kindergarten children, was subsequently included in a project book that staff members from the school presented to their counterparts from schools in Spain, England and Poland at recently held project partners' meeting held in Barbate, Spain.

During the previous term, the schools had focused on monuments commemorating important events in the history of each country represented in the project. During the meeting in Spain, teachers from the English school which is co-ordinating the project, distributed calendars featuring monuments from each country, and the participants discussed the work for the forthcoming term, which will be the last of the three-year project.

During the visit to Spain, the meeting participants also joined the Spanish school for a visit to Seville where they visited the Alcazar, Plaza de Espana, the cathedral and the museum, and the famous Cathedral of Cadiz.

The Mtarfa school's participation in the project and the meetings was made possible through EU funds provided through the European Union Programmes Agency in Malta.

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