Panshanger pupils over the moon after receiving top national award

Pupils in Panshanger have hit the nail on the head with their prize-winning language project.

Children at Panshanger Primary School were on top of the world when they found out that their school’s eTwinning project had received the top prize at the British Council eTwinning National Conference.

The project, called “I’ve got a frog in my throat” involved 15 schools from 11 European countries and compared idioms in different languages.

The brainchild of part-time French teacher Sarah Bruce, the project sought to help children learn about language and its links to cultural heritage in different countries.

Sarah said that the children adored finding out about foreign idioms, including the Italian phrase “have you got ham in your ears?” - meaning “are you listening properly?” and the Finnish phrase for cherry-picking, “picking the currants out of the bun”.

She added that the English phrase “I’ve got a frog in my throat” went down very well with amused children in their partner schools.

eTwinning is a European Commission-funded digital community encouraging collaboration between schools across Europe and beyond.

Panshanger Primary has been a member of the eTwinning community for nearly seven years, with a wide variety of projects undertaken during that time.

At the conference at the University of Warwick on June 9, Sarah’s project had been selected to receive one of 100 quality labels, but said she was “surprised and delighted” to be presented with the award for Best UK eTwinning project of 2018.

One of the judges commented that the project had “a clever, amusing and motivating approach to language learning, achieving high impact on developing language skills”.

Sarah was presented with a prize of Amazon vouchers.

Sarah said: “This recognition of the children’s hard work is quite simply the icing on the cake!”