As April days drifted towards May and preparations for the Eurovision Song Contest began, a junior class of young children were busily working to present their entry in another much-loved contest – Schoolovision!
Schoolovision is an eTwinning project between European schools and is a primary schools’ version of the Eurovision Song Contest. It was created eight years ago by Michael Purves of Yester Primary School in the UK and more than 30 partner schools participate in it annually.
This year 35 European schools participated and Dun Ġorġ Preca Primary School, Ħamrun GP got the best result since 2009. We placed fourth with 146 points!
One class from each participating European country chooses a song, representative of their country, practises it, records it and finally uploads the music video to the project blog a week before the real contest. This gives participating children the chance to view all songs in their classes, and vote for their favourite songs.
On the day before the real Eurovision Song Contest, each country meets using the online video conferencing tool FlashMeeting to cast their votes, in the same way as in the Eurovision Song Contest.
Trophies are awarded, engraved and posted to the first three winning countries.
Schoolovision is an awesome project which gives the children a chance to communicate and collaborate with other schoolchildren across Europe by adding their comments to each and every video on the blog.
The video can be viewed at http://schoolovision2016.blogspot.com.mt/search/label/Malta
It gives them great interesting insights of different European cultures and enhances motivation and creativity in all children, even those with learning disabilities. I have been participating in this project for eight years now and through experience I can say that Schoolovision helped all children to believe in their capabilities and discover the wonderful talents hidden within them.
Music is the bridge between heaven and earth and thus it is a wonderful tool which brings European children together through song. Music breaks language barriers and seems to translate every song into everyone’s native language.
Schoolovision has become a bridge between participating countries and it has helped us teachers practise integrated learning in our schools and address lots of areas of the curriculum. It enhances investigation as we research and learn about participating countries (geography) and using ICT. It also allows them to make use of drama through their singing, practise their language skills and develop their math skills during the voting. Schoolovision entries have improved and become sophisticated over the years and this has made the project more and more interesting.
The song for this year was Teddy Bear Magic. Its stanzas were written by 8-year-old Zachary Sammut. The refrain was written by myself as part of a personal experience. The enchanting music was composed by John Anthony Fsadni.
The song included parts for soloists and they truly gave a great performance. The drama part was created and discussed by the boys themselves and they did a great job too!
The children liked the song very much and they learnt it very quickly. The recording of the song was done at Philip Vella Studio and the videographer Sebio Aquilina accompanied us on site to capture great shots of our performance.
Special thanks go to the managing director of Joinwell Furniture Malta, Martin Galea, for allowing us to film part of our video in the premises. I must say it was the best part of our performance and participants will surely treasure this experience for years to come.
I would like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to our sponsors who accepted willingly to give us a helping hand with hair and make up to make the natural beauty of our children stand out!
Schoolovision is a great challenge for us and all our sponsors but, when they realise that there is no commercial gain from this educational project, they are happy to help.
Now that Schoolovision2016 is over, we will start planning for Schoolovision2017!