Hello! We are Mariia and Ekaterina from Russia. We are both 24 years old. We were volunteering as teaching assistants in a Danish boarding school called Halvorsminde Efterskole. Because we did our solidarity project together we decided to make only one project description for both.Together we created a plan about how to introduce Russian culture and language to students and teachers.
We organized many culinary classes by using recipes from Eastern European cuisine. Now students know how to cook syrniki, sochniki, vareniki, draniki, olivier salad etc. Of course, some of the students were prejudiced at first. For example, how can you use cottage cheese in sweet dishes? Or how can you make syrniki vegan? Some of them have tried tofu for the first time. We tried our best to make them more open-minded and not to be afraid to try new dishes.
A teacher in Efterskole always has one working evening shift a week. You can be very creative and organize any kind of activities you want. We often organized Russian club for students who were interested in learning Russian language and culture. Of course, Russian isn’t the easiest language to learn, but both students and us had fun exploring Russian language and culture. When you teach your mother tongue, you look at it from a different angle. Some students who were most diligent could hold a basic conversation in Russian. We are really proud of our students and their interest.
Once we thought it would be fun to organize a quest about Russian culture so students and teachers can learn more about it. We planned everything from the scratch and offered this activity to teachers as an extracurricular one in the evening. We found relevant and interesting information about Russia, made a Power Point presentation, did timing management, planned student distribution in groups, created a scheme for summarising the results, and prepared a present for the winners – Russian gingerbread and sweets. All the students took part in it, they were running around the territory of the school looking for tasks on the wall hidden in unexpected places and marked with a Russian flag. The quest was very fun, entertaining, and, at the same time, informative for students, they learned a lot about our homeland.
We are happy we had such a great experience, it was an unforgettable year for us.
ESC Solidarity Projects 