Reciprocity Project Update: From Monmouth, IL to Northern Ireland

We want to thank Mariah Garzee, Central Intermediate School teacher from Monmouth, Illinois, for providing this nice summary of her students’ work with Oonagh McAlister and Anna Martin’s classes from Northern Ireland. Anna teaches at St. Brigid’s Primary School, and Oonagh is a teacher at County Derry Primary School.

These student exchanges were part of this year’s Reciprocity Project.

Mariah Wrote:

Oonagh, Anna, and I have wrapped up a small project for the Reciprocity Project, and I wanted to share our work with everyone. Since the classes were not very familiar with the places of our partner classes, we began by creating introductory videos to send each other with a small amount of information.

Next, the classes began researching their own places. Students made posters to showcase this information that were sent to the other classes. Each class got to study these posters to learn about the other locations and do comparisons. My class made a Venn diagram after looking at the posters from the two Northern Ireland classes.

Finally, we held Zoom sessions with all three of the classes, where the students got to take turns asking and answering questions they had after looking at the posters and learning about the other places. They asked questions ranging from clothing, weather, and school schedules to video games, sports, and social media trends. We ended the Zoom with a final conversation about our places. After logging off, my students talked about how they learned that we were pretty similar for being so far apart, but that we also had some interesting differences!

Thank you for setting this up, and thank you to Oonagh and Anna for working with my class and getting the Zoom to work out despite the time differences. My students really enjoyed the experience!

Below are some of the posters each class worked on to share about their place: