On the International School of Stuttgart’s Sindelfingen campus, we highly value and support the languages of our students. We follow our own inter-lingual language learning philosophy and are very interested in the philosophies of other schools and institutions. The Erasmus+ Programme supported us to compare and contrast different approaches and facilitated the creation of close working relationships with our partner schools in Estonia, Spain and the Netherlands.

 

Our project enabled three student exchanges, each time six to eight students from each school visited a partner school to investigate local traditions based on the season of the year: the feast of St Jordi in Spain (Catalonia region), the Dutch take on St Maarten in Amsterdam, and our own international festival here when we hosted the final celebration in Sindelfingen in the summer of 2018. Teachers also received the opportunity to travel to partner schools to learn about their approaches to linguistically-inclusive team-based teaching.

 

The final products of the project include a Book of Traditions with each country's spring, summer, autumn and winter traditions, a catalogue of Dual-Language Teaching Strategies, and a website promoting the best way strategies for supporting students' language learning, incorporating all our schools' best practices.

 

We are grateful to the EU's Erasmus+ programme for supporting this project, and we continue to maintain a warm relationship with our partner schools: The Amsterdam International Community School, the Narva Paju School in Narva (Estonia), and the Escola Pla de Mar in El Vendrell (Catalan region of Spain).