C8 - VIRTUAL ACTIVITY Langerwehe

The 1st International Meeting of the Circus of Emotions Erasmus+ project was planned to be held from the 1^st until the 7^th of March 2020 at Europaschule Langerwehe (Germany), but the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis forced us to postpone it. During the confinement, we prepared activities to motivate the participating students in order to meet again in November, but the situation did not improve. Therefore, we decided to hold a Virtual International Meeting with students from the four schools.

German experts in circus, theater and emotional intelligence were hired for this activity. Despite setbacks such as the illness of one of the experts on the scheduled dates (1st week of December), we were finally able to start this Virtual Meeting organised by Europaschule Langerwehe.

DAY 1: WEDNESDAY 9^th DECEMBER

We had a German circus expert and we had an online workshop on acrobatics and movement in relation to the characters of Alice in Wonderland and six basic emotions: joy, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, and surprise. At the end of the day we shared the choreographies prepared by the different groups of students through online connections with the Zoom platform. Each center showed off their creations from their gym and it worked very well, especially the fact that the students interacted and maintained a first virtual contact.

DAY 2: THURSDAY 10^th DECEMBER

We encountered the added difficulty that Lithuanian students and teachers had been confined to their homes. The coordination of the teaching staff was essential to be able to adapt the activities depending on the situation and the needs of each center. On Wednesday we worked in groups to create the Facebook Museum of Emotions. Each group made a mural with one of the 6 emotions with the names in English, Valencian, Spanish, German and Lithuanian, plus photos of the students representing the emotions. The Spanish students also recorded a video in English presenting their mural to the rest of the students participating in the project. In the middle of the day we managed to play a Kahoot online with the photos and the faces / emotions that the students had taken during the confinement. It was a lot of fun and we were able to play simultaneously from different parts of Europe. You will also be able to see the murals and videos of each emotion on the project website soon.

DAY 3: FRIDAY 10^th OF DECEMBER

In Spain we did two activities prepared by our teachers: a mime and movement workshop and another workshop with pictures from a calendar and phrases from the book Alice in Wonderland. Students chose a sentence and did a Tik-Tok in groups of three. To conclude, we did a video conference with the other three centers and shared what we had each done. We showed the videos featuring the murals of the six basic emotions in English and the five Tik-Toks. The farewell of the students and teachers was very emotional, with the satisfaction of having started working on the Circus of Emotions project despite all the obstacles we encountered. It wasn’t easy, but it was worth it. We do not know if we will be able to travel for the next International Meetings in Kaunas (Lithuania) and Herzogenrath (Germany), but for sure the project will continue virtually.

Next step of our Circus of Emotions: C9 Lithuania!