Words cannot describe our delight at being back in-person for our children’s classes. Although it has been 18 months since we last properly saw them and we knew that they would have grown, we have still been surprised by the changes in the children. Even the ones we had been seeing in our online lessons appear different when face-to-face!
Walking in their shoes
We’ve all though, quickly got back into the swing of meeting again and the children are as ever, doing us proud in terms of their learning. Last month, many of them wrote short letters in the language(s) they are learning, answering the question: “What do you wish you could change in the world for children like you and Little Amal?”.
Little Amal is a giant puppet created as part of an art and theatre project by Good Chance Production. She represents a young Syrian girl and all the displaced children in the world and is making a long journey of 8000 kilometres through Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom. This remarkable performance seeks to provide an artistic answer to our troubled times: a cultural odyssey that transcends borders, politics and language. For further information on the project, visit walkwithamal.org
To the UK from Cambodia
Chansopha Biermann, who started Linguatastic over 35 years ago ended up coming to the UK, not as a child, but as a young adult due to the war in Cambodia. The Little Amal project is therefore very close to the Linguatastic Team’s hearts and we thought what a wonderful way to help the children to think about their world and practise the languages they are learning with us! Please have a look at our Facebook page for some samples of the letters written. They are to be presented to the European Parliament in Brussels on 6th October.
And although by the time of reading, it will probably be too late for any more children to join the letter writing project, there is a somewhat related event organised by the UN Refugee Agency which is called “Together we run with refugees” which is inviting people to run or walk 26 miles in 26 days for the 26 million refugees around the world between 1st and 26th October.