1. Monika Firych
Comenius project
This school year I decided to sign up as a member of Comenius group in Paderewski
Private Grammar School because I thought that it could be a truly amazing and developmental
experience. Fortunately, I was right.
I started my work from helping in preparations for the Comenius visit in our school.
We were supposed to host students from three countries (Italy, Turkey, Czech Republic) and
provide them with suitable attractions, entertainment and organize theme workshops. I was
responsible for planning and conducting integration games in order to allow students to get to
know each other better. These included playing charades, working in pairs or groups of five
people, throwing balls and presenting small theatre scenes. In the end, I was positively
surprised with the final outcome of our mutual work because I could already notice some
apparently random students talking to each other and basically it has been our goal.
Apart from working at school, we organized also a few trips – Lublin and neighboring
cities, as well as the capital city of Poland – Warsaw. Basically, I believe that this part of
Comenius visit is particularly important because sightseeing enables to acquaint foreign
students with local culture, customs, landmarks and people. In my opinion, the trips, which
we organized, were conducted in a very good way and I guess that all Comenius students
enjoyed them a lot.
After the visit in Poland, we started working on the next Comenius module – “Eurokid
is an entrepreneur”. Our tasks involved creating a fictional tourist agency offering services
suitable to the market needs, working on marketing plan and offers of trips to Turkey, setting
up a website and preparing some forms of advertisement. The group chose me to be their
leader, therefore my main tasks were supervising the entire work, introducing corrections
where necessary and being responsible for presenting the results of our work within the time.
I think that my only mistake during our collaboration was not involving all members of the
group in the project. Obviously, it was partly their choice but I am aware that I could find
some way to motivate them and oblige to completing their tasks on time. Nevertheless, the
final effect of our work satisfies me a lot and I reckon that it has been prepared on a very good
level.
Thanks to my and Agnieszka’s constant work on the module, we were rewarded with a
trip to Istanbul with five other students from our school and our teachers. This visit was a very
entertaining, absorbing and instructive one. I am particularly pleased that I got to know
Turkish culture and customs better. Moreover, learning belly dance and Turkish song, as well
as presenting them to other students, was a great and unforgettable experience. One more
thing that I truly enjoy as a part of every Comenius visit is hosting foreign students by the
families of the students from a hosting school. I feel that such an experience enables to
acquaint with local traditions and integrate even more.

2. After the visit in Istanbul our last task was to work on the module connected with
volunteering. Therefore, my group was supposed to prepare a social campaign concerning a
subject chosen through conducting a survey among our school’s students. The result occurred
to be addiction to caffeine, which is present in coffee, tea, as well as energetic and fizzy
drinks. We decided to prepare a few posters presenting the amount of caffeine in particular
drinks and some facts about this addiction. Apart from that, we searched for some curiosities
concerning the problem worldwide and hang them out in the school. The final result of the
campaign was very positive, I could notice a lot of students reading the posters and I think
that we managed to make them realize some important facts about caffeinism.