Krenglbach in
Austria
Our partner school in Austria now has its own Website at http://www.oka.at/krenglbach and they are sponsored by their local electricity company.
John Newton and Mike Jones visited Austria at the end of November 1998 and had a wonderful week being grandly entertained by our Austrian hosts. We made visits to Salzburg, birthplace of Mozart and amongst other things were treated to a special delight 'Salzburger Nockerl' which is a pudding which is just divine but very difficult to make.
We also visited the local Primary partner school several times and went to one of their neighbouring Secondary school in Pichl. We made A very interesting visit to a local market to sample horse meat!!!, schnapps and pumpkin seed oil a local delicacy amongst many others. The people were all very welcoming and really made us feel at home.
In school we were introduced to 'Lernen durch Bewegung' which was a new concept for us but involved children skateboarding up and down corridors whilst learning new spellings and keeping words in their heads to complete a piece of writing. A little like our LOOK, COVER, WRITE, CHECK method but with the PE thrown in. We also introduced the children to our pocketbook computers the PSIONS we had been using in school and they were very impressed by our maths challenges set by our children. They set some for our children on the computers and we brought them home for our children to complete. We now intend to email challenges to each other having been introduced this way. We also hope to send them some palmtops to use as they are now available with a German desktop.
A short visit was also made to the Czech Republic only an hour away from where we were staying. We sampled some local gingerbread in Bad Leonfelden a speciality of the area and bought some sweets and biscuits for all the staff slaving away back at school.
The final night was very poignant because one of the partner schools in Warthe in Germany was due to be closed in June 1999 and it was possible that we would not meet again. Many friendships and plans were made for the continuation of the project with a school in Eberswalde in Germany and the whole group will meet again in UK in October 1999 when we hope to host our guests as magnificently as we have been treated in our visit this year to both Germany and Austria.