Korea Calling

5C had a unique opportunity to communicate to a class in South Korea. Angelina, Arnie and George explain:

At the start of this year, 5C were chosen to link up with a school in South Korea as part of the Global LYNCs project. This project was to help us meet kids our age from a different country and learn about their culture. We used the school's Polycom to link up face to face with the South Korean school four times over the year.

The first time we met, we told the students all about ourselves: our names, our families and our hobbies. We each made a slide on Book Creator on the iPads, which Harry sent to them by email before the link up.  During the link up, we took turns to share our information and had to guess who each person was from the information they gave us.

The next time we linked up, we focused on our traditional sports.  We told the South Korean students about AFL and cricket and gave them demonstrations of how to play.  The South Korean students showed us how to do some Tae Kwon Do moves. They chopped some wood with their bare hands, we were all amazed!

The third time we linked up, we shared our traditions, such as clothing, art and music.  We sent them a cork hat, along with a CD of Aboriginal music, a boomerang, some Aboriginal art postcards, an Australian flag and some cuddly koalas!  We demonstrated how to play clap sticks and rain sticks and taught them how to make a didgeridoo.  We also taught them how to sing and sign the National Anthem with AUSLAN.  The South Korean students played their traditional instruments for us and we got to have a go too.  George and Mackenzie got to dress up in some of the South Korean traditional clothing. It was very different to what we are used to wearing! 

In the final session, we focused on food. This was our favourite lesson! We learned how to make rice balls with dried seaweed.  It was so yum (for some of us)! We tried some South Korean desserts and a rice bran drink. The drink looked like lemonade but it tasted nothing like it! We also tried pumpkin taffy, which was very chewy and sweet. It didn’t taste like pumpkin at all! We sent the South Korean students ANZAC biscuits, TimTams, Vegemite, Savoys and ingredients to make Pavlovas.  We think they enjoyed the TimTams best and they had fun trying a TimTam Slam!

We had an amazing time during the Global LYNCs project and it was sad to say goodbye to our new friends. We learned a lot about South Korean culture and how they live.