It’s been an unusual week – no French lessons ! That’s because I’m in Belgium! I was invited by the British Council to join a team of 13 teachers to represent the United Kingdom at the 10th anniversary eTwinning conference. That is based on the eTwinning project Mr Marsh’s class last year did with me – so well done current Year 6s!
Yesterday I got up very early & flew from Manchester to Brussels. It’s about an hour’s flight. The conference started at lunchtime, where we listened to some very interesting people who talked about active citizenship, the challenges faced by young people globally, intercultural understanding and thinking globally / acting locally. The speeches where mostly in French, and we’re about 45 minutes long each, so I’ve had lots of French practice already 
After all the speeches there was a fantastic networking activity – there are about 500 delegates here from all over Europe, so we were split into teams for an urban pursuit game. In teams of 10 we were given a tablet which had software on it for the game. It was a live digital map, with challenges pinpointed all over Brussels city centre. We had to find the pinpointed locations – as soon as we got there, the challenges became live. Some of the challenges were questions – some based on Belgian history or eTwinning facts ( I wasn’t to good on those) , but I came into my all on the film trivia questions. There were some challenges that were really fun though – we were told to upload photos or videos of our team recreating famous Belgian statues or pictures. My favourite was to create the longest human chain we could in the central square of Brussels. My teammates & I had to ask other random tourists to help out, which was very funny because of all the different languages spoken. Then we had to run back to the hotel to get our tablet back before the deadline. It was all worth it though, because at the dinner in the evening it was announced that my team had won! 
Today is a full day of workshops, so I’ll tell you all about that later on!