St Thomas international linking
Our schools
I'm Cathy Francis, a teacher at St Thomas Roman Catholic Primary School in Keith. In August 2004, the children and staff of St Thomas and the Lahore Lyceum in Lahore, Pakistan, formed a friendship, and from this developed a close working, sustainable and highly productive partnership. St Thomas School is a small primary in Keith in the northeast of Scotland. Our community is virtually all locally born and does not reflect the larger cultural diversity of the UK. The Lahore Lyceum is a larger fee-paying school in a suburb of Lahore, a major city in northern Pakistan. The pupils are taught in English, although Urdu or Punjabi would often be their native language at home.
The beginning
This work all grew from an attempt to make an environmental studies topic on Pakistan real and properly tangible for my P6-7 class. The British Council’s website provided details of DFID (Department for International Development) support in finding and establishing working partnerships. This was an opportunity to make contact with real people in foreign countries and bring our class work alive. This initial urge to make learning fun, interesting and relevant has grown to encompass our whole school. The case study which follows gives a flavour of the Pakistani link work we have explored and thrived on. Please have a go yourselves and if you would like to find out more please contact us through the St Thomas School website.
Getting started
Once Mrs Farhat Junaid (the Lahore Lyceum Rachna Block Administrator) and I had made initial email contact, the children’s work began with a simple email of greetings to each other with their photographs attached via their teachers’ email addresses. The children in each school reacted with great excitement on receiving replies and were eager to find out more about each other.
Pakistan featured on our school’s three-year rolling topic plan as an area of study for P6-7. The topic usually follows an old BBC Landmarks video series and is enhanced by a few artefacts I have amassed over the years - a pair of plimsolls, a tea towel, a hockey stick and a borrowed copy of the Qur'an! During the topic I liked to give the class opportunity for personal study, with most of the research done on the internet or from a few library books. This year the children had the chance to email their friends in Lahore.
The children sought information on diverse subjects: music, reptiles, war and fashion, to name a few. We shared our work via email and Farhat’s children loved it and were impressed. Encouraged by their response, we made prayer mats and planned and built models of potential mosques for Keith. Jointly we focused on a consideration of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. We looked at children in Pakistan across all social classes and areas of the country and compared them to our situation in Scotland and to the situation of our friends at the Lyceum. Many of the discussions between the children in both countries were very thought-provoking. Some of this children’s rights work is on our school website.
Our friends in Lahore were invaluable as a source of information and encouragement. I did use the Landmarks video as part of our study, but because of our real contacts we learnt much more than the video could provide.
