First project meeting in Lodz, Poland,
 October 26-29, 2006

Participating:

Adam Kubera (SP 113 in Lodz, coordinator)
Małgorzata Pater-Fijałowska (SP 113 in Lodz, coordinator)
Wiesława Ślusarz (SP 23 Rzeszow, Poland)
Monika Boczoń Polska (SP 23 Rzeszow, Poland)
Valentina Dimitrowa (Varna, Bulgaria)
Maria Isabel Pereira (Custóias, Portugal)
Delfina Almeida (Custóias, Portugal)
Mário Norte (Custóias, Portugal)
Vincezo Sabia (Procida, Italy)
Giuseppe Garufi (Taormina, Italy)

Objectives:

    Planning and discussing the collaborative activities to be conducted during the first project year, working out evaluation questionnaires, tracing the history of the city of Łódź during
a sightseeing tour as well as becoming acquainted with the traditional Polish cuisine.

Day 1

     The guests were picked up at the station and transferred to the hotel. As each of the groups arrived at a different time, we only had a short welcome meeting at the hotel in which we went over the schedule of the meeting. Afterwards we all had dinner of traditional Polish dishes
at the “U Chochola” restaurant.

Day 2 

It was divided in three parts: an official ‘welcome’ meeting, a working session as well as free time for sightseeing the city.

Official part

Both the official part and the working session took place in 113 Primary School. Having arrived
at the school, our guests were given an official welcome by the school head Ms Danuta Baszczyńska, the deputy head Ms Barbara Trebacz as well as by the school staff and a group of our students. After the welcome meeting our guests were shown an exhibition arranged with the help of Ms Agnieszka Szeflinska, our Art teacher, relevant to our project theme. We put on display our students’ works concerning the subject of healthy diets as well as illustrated posters giving some information about our partnership countries. We showed our guests round the school too, inviting them to see our classrooms during regular school lessons  and to say hello to the pupils and students of several levels.

They also enjoyed watching live performances by the school choir run by Ms Grazyna Rachalewska, our Music teacher, and by the school dance band. The choir gave a special performance to welcome our visitors while the dance band presented several dances, of which the flamenco dance by Paulina (VIb) was of exceptional artistic value. Later our guests received little souvenirs such as the works of our pupils, the picture albums
of Lodz and the maps of the city.

Working session

Having shown the visitors our school building and introduced them to our students, we all moved to the so-called “Comenius corner”, a room used for the needs of our project work.  Then the work on the project began, conducted and coordinated by our English teachers and the school Comenius coordinators at the same time, Mr Adam Kubera and Ms Malgorzata Pater-Fijalkowska. During the session the most important tasks for the next months of the cooperation were determined, such as

-  acquainting our students with the cultures of partnership countries with putting particular emphasis on the aspect of their regional cuisines
-  fixing the dates of students’ online chats (the first one was arranged for November 2006)
-  encouraging  peer correspondence between students of all our schools (the first exchange
of letters set on December meeting in Portugal (during the NEAC Thematic Conference)
-  holding all-school student contests for the best design of the project logo in accordance with the rules established during this meeting
-  organising project-related exhibitions of the regional cuisine and healthy food
-  presenting alimentary traditions connected with Christmas celebrations in each of the partnership countries
-  setting the date of the next meeting (March 19-25, Portugal)

After the session the guests were invited to a school lunch, where they could taste a variety of dishes representative of traditional Polish cuisine

Visiting Lodz

After lunch we saw a short multimedia presentation of our city, which was followed by a guided sightseeing tour of Lodz. Among other places, the guests saw the Herbst’s residence (an estate belonging to a former factory owner) and they visited the museum of cinematography located
in the Scheibler’s palace (the owner was often referred to as the cotton king). Later, through the coach windows our guests saw the biggest palace in Lodz - the Poznanski’s palace and the former Jewish district of Baluty. The tour was of good educational value owing to the guide who gave
a very interesting lesson of our local history. Despite the Friday afternoon rush hour,
we managed to avoid traffic jams in the city centre, which gave us plenty more time for sightseeing.

The day was finished in a nice Polish restaurant ‘Chlopska Izba’ situated in Piotrkowska Street opposite the Grand Hotel, which was another good opportunity for our guests to taste the best dishes of our traditional cuisine.

Day 3

Just like the day before, the guests were brought to the school to take part in another working session in which the methods of the project evaluation were discussed, and the last details of our collaborative work were settled for the months to come. Among other things, we discussed
the basic structure of our multilingual project website (placed on the NEAC  server by courtesy of our project host) which is meant to constitute the ultimate end-product of our project cooperation. There were also multimedia displays in which our project partners presented their schools and regions. The meeting ended with showing the guests round the school IT classroom where they had a chance of showing each other their schools’ websites and visiting the Network of European Alimentary Culture (NEAC) website.    

After the session we showed our guests the biggest shopping centre in our city, Manufaktura (Manufacture)  In the evening the social part of our project meeting took place, in which our school teachers met our visitors in the Lodz Kaliska pub. The atmosphere was excellent and everyone had a good time.

Day 4

It’s early Sunday morning and it’s time to say goodbye. We pick our visitors up to the railway station. Although the weather (exceptionally good during the previous three days of our visitors’ stay in Lodz) gets much worse and it is pouring with rain when we arrive at the station, we all feel very happy with meeting each other. We spend the last minutes waiting for the Warsaw train and coach to leave and talking about our next meeting in Portugal in the spring of 2007. All of our guests have left Lodz by noon time, the last group to leave were our Italian and Bulgarian colleagues.

Conclusion:

Despite a short meeting time we will all have plenty of nice memories. We got to know each other as a team (it was the first time some of us had met), exchanging a lot of valuable information and sharing our unique experiences. Finally, the working sessions were an excellent opportunity for us to meet the main objectives of this meeting, which was to arrange our collaborative work for the first year of our Comenius Project. As hosts of that meeting, we were glad to show our visitors the most interesting parts of the city and give them a taste of traditional Polish cuisine. We are very happy to have such great friends in our Comenius team!

See you in Poland again in the final project meeting in 2009!