When you’re having fun at school it’s hard to stop working on something that’s a source of continual satisfaction. Our collection of counting rhymes is now become richer than ever: it’s an ambitious project and one that has brought us so much pleasure.
When we started out, we intended
to ask for help from as many Italian schools as possible. However not
being experts in surfing
the web we weren’t able to make the best use of computers and modems. The
alternative of mailing almost 4800 Direzioni Didattiche (local education
authorities) through the traditional Italian postal service was also impractical.
Yet we
were already in too deep - the
craze for thinking up new counting rhymes had already “infected” our
schoolchildren and fired their imaginations.
Though seemingly far-fetched and impossible, I for one am a great believer in the utopias and dreams of children. Destroying their dreams means putting a stop to their inventiveness and plans for the future, a future which each of us should look forward to with hope and expectation.
So thanks to friends around Italy who
forwarded us the addresses of local schools and education boards
they already had compiled
and stored in their computers, and thanks also
to my determination and several weeks of night time work I finally
managed, after a few months, to complete the list of
Italy’s Direzioni
Didattiche and of Italian school abroad.
By March 1996 we were finally ready to
print the labels with the addresses and start organising things at school. It
would have been impossible and counterproductive to deposit a mass of disorderly
letters at the local post office so we decided to divide up our tasks.
All five classes at school took part: photocopying, sticking on labels, inserting letters in envelopes, gluing, sorting envelopes to send by province and then placing them in big boxes ready for mailing.
The letters were sent at the start of April 1996 and in the two months left in that school year we received mountains of post: piles of letters, sheets, notebooks, audiocassettes, books and out and out publications: a priceless mine of treasure!
As the circular letter we sent also featured our e-mail address, some schools transmitted us material over the Internet and this new form of communication has really turned out to be extremely useful and convenient.
We then found ourselves facing a problem: how best to sort out this intricate pile of material and bring some order to all the correspondence we had received?
We decided to adapt an idea that came to us from our Head – someone in the fifth class went out and bought a large register in which to register each item of post. From then on our children wrote down the name of the sender school; they registered the nature of the received item (almost always counting rhymes), the date of receipt and allocated each item a progressive number. Dates and numbers were also recorded on every letter. As for e-mails we converted them into “traditional” letters by printing them out, registering them and filing them just like the others. This method made it easy to identify and locate each school’s envelope once it had been sorted and filed in a ring-binder.
The use of protocol numbers also turned out to be very helpful. Given the quantity of post delivered each day they served as tools for handling communication. We also used them as a checking device to make sure we sent out the free copy of our magazine which we had promised to all participating schools.
Every letter we received was read by the children though it wasn’t always possible to read every single counting rhyme.
To facilitate our children’s reading , in the summer holidays I copied out all the material we had received into my PC. Of course many of the better known counting rhymes were identical and these were transcribed just once. Efforts were made to make the most of each school’s contribution by selecting and copying down at least one rhyme from each participating school.
Apart from the immense satisfaction of receiving post from all of Italy’s regions, we should emphasise the tremendous response from all the schools. Though some did already have their own collection of counting-out and nursery rhymes, most set to work with us on the project from scratch The moment when we actually saw our raw material transformed into a printed, organised form was unforgettable – and tremendously exciting for all involved.
Mauro Presini
Counting-out rhymes: home
