My partner and I had a slow start to the new year. They had problems with their computer connections and we were out of touch for several weeks. Meanwhile, my students continued to meet and to send ideas to their Armenian partners regarding their partnership projects. Also, during this "downtime" my students did some research on Armenia, particularly on the genocide and the war with Azerbaijan. They also discovered that Vayk School #2 has its own web page. They were very excited by this discovery!

We've also been making plans for a pot luck dinner with their families when Maro comes to visit!

We began by thinking we'd serve "American food", discovered that we didn't know what "American food" was -- I have a Vietnamese and Korean student in my group. That led us to the decision to serve ethnic food that we all eat regularly at home.

Several weeks ago, the students in Armenia were back on line and we've been continuing our partnership work. To refresh your memory of our project: Americans and Armenians had read The Terrible Things, a picture book by Eve Bunting. Our website contains a discussion of the story and its meaning. Following the discussion, Armenian and American students formed partnerships to create web pages related to the theme of the book (We need to unite and stand up against injustice and intolerance.)

If you check the partnership folders you can see what each pair is attempting to do. The projects include:

• a song in both English and Armenian
  
  
• a story of bullying
  
  
• research on the Armenian genocide plus others
  
  
• a story of what happens to White Rabbit at the end of the book
  
  
• historical examples of when people succeeded in working together
  
  
• a collection of memorials to peace
  
  
• research on bullying in their own schools
  
  

The partnerships are taking awhile to gain momentum. My students are very aware that they need to give the Armenian students an equal say in the details of the project. The Armenian students seem reluctant to give their ideas. We are working on this and I am confident that once the projects really get going they'll produce some great stuff!