The Italian school in Liberi Nantes born some years ago, in 2011.
Along the white line around the football pitches some women volunteers of the association was thinking that near by sport, running or walking together, it was necessary to have a common language, in order to understand each other. It was necessary that for all to find a tool for understand one each other and especially out of the pitch, in the society. The persons who came in the association speak different dialect and languages: Dari, Arab, many African dialect, Swahili, Amarico , Hausa… sometimes mixed with a bit of English and French.
“Make up an Italian School! We can call the guys and the girls who arrive here to play and offer them the possibility to study together!”
And so, near by football and hiking, it was born another area for Liberi Nantes, a new project open to everybody.
The year pass by and the activities proposed by the school become regular. We are host in the Casa del Popolo, a structure near by the XXV Aprile, every year we offer lessons of Italian in a small classroom for 20 students. We’ve got a blackboard and some desks, few things, but chalks, pens and papers permit us to start a didactic course, built on words, sounds and the needs to learn how to communicate the requirements. And then every year the white walls of our school are ready for new map of countries and towns, draws of the seasons. We learn that when it rains you need an “umbrella” and when there’s the sun the heart is calmer. And then we take our beloved alphabetic letter and also this year we start again:
“Madame and gentleman we open the stage to A as Apple, B as Boy, C as Cloud”, because they are always the same, our A, B. and C, but for our students everytime they are full of different sounds, remembers and new emotions. And we start again every year from those letters, form our A, B, and C to learn together with the guys how to describe the world around them.
The School of Italian of Liberi Nantes is a school a bit different, maybe you will understand. We meet the guys one or two times per week, and we know that we will not form their linguistic knowledge. What they lean in our class is a little treasure: in our school the guys can make exercises, put themselves in play, mime a word when they don’t know the translation, learn how to use the body and its movement to feel the new language and make them listened, they left their shyness and try, try everytime to talk. They try and fail, but once while they try they reach the goal, as usually happens in the classroom and in normal life.
What these guys do in our class is never give up and try again.
Didactic note: our target are people more than 17 years old. But we don’t exclude that mothers with children can come with them, we love children!
The Italian course is for people at the beginning or people who have a level A1 (due to European legislation for the language knowledge QCER)
Info: scuola@liberinantes.org