New ICEKits available on the website

In March 2021 ICEPELL practitioners (teachers, student teachers and teacher librarians) joined ICEPro Virtual, a COVID-19 online version of our ICEPro Professional Development course. In transnational groups called ‘Erasmus Groups’ they developed an ICEKit – a set of teaching resources around a picturebook,  These ICEKits are now available for you to download from the Outputs tab on the website.

The eight picturebooks are:

• ‘Strictly no elephants‘ by Lisa Mantchev and Taeeun Yoo (Simon & Schuster Books, 2016)
• ‘The suitcase‘ by Chris Naylor-Ballesteros (Nosy Crow, 2019)
• ‘Here we are’ by Oliver Jeffers (HarperCollins Children’s Books, 2017)
• ‘Cyril the lonely cloud‘ by Tim Hopgood (Oxford University Press, 2020)
• ‘How to be a Lion‘ by Ed Vere (Puffin Books, 2018)
• ‘The Day War Came‘ by Nicola Davies and Rebecca Cobb (Walker Books, 2019)
• ‘Perfectly Norman‘ by Tom Percival (Bloomsbury, 2017)
• ‘Whoever you are‘ by Mem Fox and Leslie Straub (Scholastic, 1997)

The ICEPELL Symposium, Nord University, Norway 

7 – 8 June 2021 

The ICEPELL Symposium is a unique online event organised for the ICEPELL project. It features a delightful mix of talks, picturebook read-alouds and practitioner testimonies.

• Speakers include: Michael Rosen, Janice Bland, Gail Ellis, Fabrizio Ferrari, Nayr Ibrahim, Sandie Mourão, Silvana Rampone, Carol Read and David Valente.
• Picturebook read-alouds are by: Steve Antony and Gro Dahle.
• Testimonies are from teachers, student teachers and teacher librarians in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and Portugal.

Do join us for two days being immersed in picturebooks for intercultural citizenship education. The ICEPELL Symposium is free to attend and open to anyone who is interested in using picturebooks for intercultural citizenship education in early English language learning.

Spring ICEPro Virtual, our 25-hour professional development course, starts on 3 March and runs for six weeks on Moodle and eTwinning. We have 26 practitioners enrolled (student teachers, teachers of English and teacher librarians) from Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and Portugal. There are two courses running and the tutors are David Valente (Nord University,Norway) and Sandie Mourão (Nova University Lisbon, Portugal)

Spring ICEPro Virtual is our solution to a 25-hour ICEPro face-to-face course which was planned to run for a week in March 2021. It is one of the four Intellectual Outputs for the ICEPELL project. 

Our first two ICEKits are ready!

We are so excited about our ICEKits. These are teachers resource packs and one of the ICEPEL Intellectual Outputs.  ICEPELL will be developing 17 ICEKits, around 17 different picturebooks. The first two kits are pilot ICEKits and will be used during the virtual professional development course that starts on 3 March 2021. 

ICEKit #1: Perfectly Norman has been developed around the picturebook Perfectly Norman by Tom Percival (Bloomsbury, 2017)

ICEKit #2: Whoever you are has been developed around the picturebook Whoever you are by Mem Fox and Leslie Staubs  (Scholastic, 1997). 

We are really proud that Danuta Wojciechowska, a picturebook creator and illustrator/designer, has been responsible for the design of our ICEKits at Lupa Design.

On 4 February 2021 Sandie Mourão gave a presentation at the TEALS /CETAPS Advanced Research Seminar on the ICESurvey results for Portugal. 

On 8 January 2021 Silvana Rampone (USR Piemonte – Rete Sostenibilità, Italy) organised a local multiplier event with the support of LEND.

Sandie Mourão (CETAPS, Nova University Lisbon) gave a webinar about the ICEPELL project, disseminating some of the initial picturebook selections and the ICEPELL eTwinning activity cycle.  It was attended by just over 150 Italian teachers. 

18 – 19 January 2021: Our 3rd Transnational Meeting transformed into a Virtual Working Group Meeting to accommodate COVID19 restrictions. Organised by Carmen Becker and her team at Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany we spent two days together working on three of our Intellectual Outputs:

• The ICEPro Course: Updates on progress
• The ICEkits: Sharing an almost-final-version of the designed ICEKit#1 Perfectly Norman by Tom Percival (Bloomsbury 2017)
• The ICESurvey: Presenting and comparing our results across the five countries; identifying the implications for our professional training course; and planning how to disseminate the results. 

It was a busy couple of days but it was great to be together and move the project forward. Things are really taking shape. 

A big thanks to Carmen and her team for making us so welcome and comfortable. 

28 September to 2 October

A Virtual Staff Training Week – Organised by Nova University Lisbon

The pandemic meant the ICEPELL consortium were not able to move forward with a face to face learning teaching training activity as scheduled, so we planned a week of virtual staff training activities to help partners get to know each other a little better, pilot and give feedback on some of the ICEPro Course components, discover some of the tools we will be using (e.g. etwinning) and discuss some of the project activities in detail. We even organised for a virtual closing lunch together!

Click on the image below for the schedule:

It was a jam packed week, but hugely successful, with positive feedback from everyone involved. 

Feedback from an ICEPELL partner:

“I wanted to say how much I enjoyed the week. I think you, and your team put together a really varied, interactive and engaging week for us. I am not a fan of online learning and my first experience was not good (…). But this experience, for someone who is fairly new to this way of working, has convinced me that it can work, it can be fun and it can be an effective way of working and learning.”

We all feel fired up to overcome the challenges COVID19 has brought to the ICEPELL project.

Date: 26 June 2020

On Friday 26 June we got together as a consortium and shared some of our activities associated with the planned Intellectual Output activities, providing a motivating up-date for everyone.

We shared the following:

• Our picturebook selection questions, which have guided us in beginning our selection of picturebooks for ICE
• An overview of the ICEkit drafts and some of our decision making
• An eTwinning cycle which will help teachers and children take action across borders
• An overview of some of the ICEPro Course sessions with objectives and targeted picturebooks, and proposed session templates.

We all realised that we’d actually managed quite a lot considering the complications we’ve encountered due to COVID-19.

Congratulations everyone!

22 to 23 June 2020

Our second transnational meeting, due to be held in Milan Italy and organised USR Piemonte, has been cancelled due to COVID19.