M5 - School Experience - Danish Lessons

When I was told that I will have also 2 lessons of Danish per week in 5.a, I was saying to myself - what will I do in the lessons? I´ll not understand at all and I´ll be pretty bored.
How wrong I was! The Danish lessons were not at all about diktats, filling up grammar excercises, reading and speaking about rules - as in Czech lessons it is usual. They had pretty interesting projects.

On first Monday (30st March) they had a project about IDENTITY. They were making their own collages on the topic - my identity. They got an A4 grey paper, scissors, glues, crayons and magazines with pictures... The teacher also took a photo of each pupil with a digital camera and went to print them. So then they had their photo in the middle of the paper and they were supposed to fill the space around with words, pictures from magazines, drawings, and pieces of authentic texts from magazines which characterize them somehow. They should express their identity through that... They spent more than 45 minutes on that and would continue next time...
Then they had some reading tasks and grammar excercises about direct speech. They were working very independently and with quite a good concentration on that...

All the pupils were working individually, but in cases they needed help, they just raised the arm and the teacher came to help them individually. They were also helping each other. I liked that very much.

The Monday after Easter (20th April) they were working on READING PROJECT - and what was surprizing to me - two classes were connected - 5.a and 6.a. And three teachers were there! The two teachers of Danish + Annette, who helped and supported the weaker pupils. Pupils were working in groups of 4, according to their reading level, both classes mixed. And each group had the same book with which they worked.
I really liked the tasks which they had, I found the project very interesting and valuable. Not only did they co-operate in cross-classes groups, and worked without a permanent control of the teacher (even in different rooms), but the tasks were really good aimed to depelop reading skills and were showing them how to focus on the most important things in the book. In my opinion this is really important nowadays, because children are losing contact with literature.

Therefore I have to say that I was really glad to see these Danish lessons.
I know that my main subjects: English and Music are mainly focused on activity of pupils (it is one of the reasons why I chose right these ones). However, I was surprised, how interesting and active lessons of Danish language could be.