Do you remember learning rhymes and poems when you were younger? Poetry is a fun way to develop language skills, remember lessons, and share stories! However, surveys show that fondness for poetry fades as children grow older, with only 11.7 percent of the adult population reading poetry in the last year. Reading and writing poetry has several benefits for students, including increasing empathy, building vocabulary, improving public speaking skills, and chunking information into memorable pieces. So, how can we teach poetry to help our students develop these skills and maintain a love for the genre?
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 It is officially holiday season! What holidays do you and your students celebrate? In Holidays & Festivals of the World, students explore how people around the world celebrate different holidays including New Years, Christmas, Ramadan, and Diwali through project based learning. Students collaborate with peers to discover traditions and culture as they create products such as holiday cards, proposals for new holidays, and stories about how they celebrate their own holidays!
There are hundreds of different ways to engage students in reading, but it can be challenging to implement strategies that work for every student in your class. One of the simplest ways to engage all of your learners is to provide a purpose for reading, but that’s easier said than done! Global project-based learning is a great way to provide an authentic purpose and engage students in reading. Because project-based learning challenges students with real-world learning experiences, the purpose becomes immediately clear to students. There are a lot of reading comprehension skills that students improve when they connect with their peers through global PBL, like summarizing, supporting claims, and comparing & contrasting. “Reading comprehension helps to improve the effectiveness of reading and understanding the given text. It enhances the vocabulary, increases the fluency of reading, develops the comprehension skills and also helps an individual to think critically and come to deductions. A student also learns to summarize the given text in less words which helps to express one's ideas in the most effective way. Hence, I think reading comprehension is an extremely important exercise in the learning of a language.” Teachers from 150 different countries have been using PenPal Schools to connect their students through global project-based learning. We’ve seen educators emphasize reading comprehension skills in different ways as they participate in projects, so we asked them to share some tips and advice for improving reading comprehension. Here are 3 ways to support reading comprehension with global PBL:
 Poverty, the environment, health, energy, equality: these are just a few of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals for education. These problems will take global collaboration and teamwork to solve. Teaching the SDGs with global project based learning helps equip students with the skills they will need to help create a brighter, healthier future with peers around the world.  Today’s PenPal Star is Dariia from Ukraine. Dariia participated in Joining Forces for the Environment to learn about the biggest issues facing our planet and the actions that people are taking to protect it. Through global project based learning, Dariia was able to collaborate with students around the world and plan how she could take action to help our planet. Her school in Ukraine emphasizes project based learning to develop global citizenship.
Over 2,000 students from around the world participated in the Global School Pride Contest, sharing what makes their school special in the PenPal Schools project Schools Around the World. We’re excited to announce the winners from this contest: Iris, Ava, Lauren, and Catherine from Trinity Preparatory School in Florida, USA!
Researchers and scientists think that when people show gratitude, they make themselves and those around them feel even happier. What are your students thankful for? In November's special PenPal contest, we invite students from around the world to discuss and share their gratitude through photography!  Our team has been working around the clock and we are excited to introduce the new and improved PenPal Schools student experience!
We made the student experience easier to navigate on desktop and mobile devices. To better support students across ages and abilities, our new experience eliminates distractions so students can focus on creating projects and collaborating with PenPals.  This past month, we received a lot of incredible entries for our Global School Pride Contest! We have loved learning about different schools around the world from all of the PenPals who participated in the contest. PenPals did a fantastic job showcasing what makes their schools special and created amazing projects! This week’s PenPal Stars, Levente and Barnabás from Hungary, did a great sharing what makes their school special and comparing their school to others around the world in this project based learning example. They used photography to show off their school to their PenPals!
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