THE EUROPEAN DAY of LANGUAGES in HOSPITAL SCHOOLS

Vilnius Jonas Lauzikas comprehensive consulting centre is an enterprise uniting four hospital schools of the capital of Lithuania. In such schools sick children are taught in accordance with the syllabi of secondary schools. Helping children to learn is approved by their parents because they don't want them feel like having lagged benind their classmates. But our patients are not only taught different school subjects. They are involved in extra-curriculum activities either.

It has become a tradition to mark the European day of languages on the 26th of September. The commemoration of this day has become even more actual during the years of our Comenius project called FRIENDSHIP without BORDERS (2004-2007) which was the greatest venture for our staff and pupils. The friendly ties with our English, Norwegian and Dutch partners encouraged us in using ICT, improving our English language skills and broadened our world outlooks.

In all hospital schools and the rehabilitation sanatorium children were invited to their classrooms decorated with E.U.-Lithuanian small flags, various posters and pictures with the words about languages. These are the words of our famous painter K.Shimonis:

"THERE ARE LOTS OF NATIONS AND LANGUAGES.
THOSE LANGUAGES ARE LIKE VARIETY OF FLOWERS IN THE PEAR TREE.
THE MORE BLOSSOMS IN IT, THE MORE ATTRACTIVE THE PEAR TREE.
THAT'S LIKE THE SKY: THE MORE STARS IN IT, THE MORE INTERESTING AND WONDERFUL THE SKY IS".

Our teachers informed the children about the most popular and wide spread languages in Europe and in the world. Lithuanian, English , Russian and Polish teachers spoke about the importance of perfect knowledge of the native language and learning foreign languages too. Children recited poems in their native language and other languages, put language labels on the map of Europe, played a game with international words and did a quiz about languages. Later they were asked to read an ad that they could see in Vilnius buses and trolley-buses in five languages.At the end of this event we all sang songs: the Lithuanian song" In the Land of Lithuania" and the English one - "If You 're Happy".The best participants were awarded the prizes from the Information bureau of the European Parliament in Lithuania.

Anastazija, a hospital teacher
Vilnius