Whytrig Middle School: World Cup Day in Durham

As part of the transition week at the Whytrig Middle School (Northumberland) over sixty Y4 schoolchildren (aged 8-9) came to Durham University to learn about Russia, Russian language and culture, and the Word Cup 2018. The event was organised by a team of Russian-speaking volunteer instructors coordinated by Dr Polina Kliuchnikova. The event consisted of a short introductory and closing sessions and two parallel workshops, one on Russia’s geography and culture, and the other on Russian language.

The day started with all attendees gathering at the Hogan Lovells lecture theatre. After a short video on Russia, the children were introduced to their workshop instructors and learnt their first words in Russian – ‘Privet’, ‘Hi’ in Russian (to greet their instructors and each other at the following workshops) and counting from 1 to 4 (used first to make their predictions about the World Cup outcomes, where only four football teams were left at that time, and then to be divided into parallel groups mixing two different classes attending the event).

Writing in Cyrillic: Introduction to Russian language

The workshop on Russian language facilitated by Svetlana Leonenko and Irina Sharonina introduced children to an entirely new language in key skills including reading, writing, listening and speaking. The instructors started by inviting pupils to read simple words in Russian without prior familiarization with the script and guess their meanings; then to work with the alphabet and analyse its graphical composition. After that, guided by instructors through a short animated alphabet song, the children learned the pronunciation of each letter and some cognates for animals (e.g. ‘pingvin’ as the Russian for ‘penguin’ or ‘tigr’ as the Russian for ‘tiger’). The next step introduced simple phrases for greeting and short dialogues which the children then practiced in small groups. Each workshop group of 30-32 children consisted of pupils coming from two different primary schools spending their first transition week together. This mean that for some children this was their first opportunity to get to know each other and introduce themselves, which they did – in Russian! They then teamed up into smaller groups to play the so-called 'broken phone’ game (aka ‘Chinese whispers’), while revising the Russian words they had just learned, from short ones, such as ‘tri’ ('three') or ‘lev’ ('lion') to longer ones like ‘spasibo’ ('thank you') or ‘krokodil’ ('crocodile').

Building on the knowledge of newly acquired Russian words, basic reading skills were developed by introducing the children to the transliteration of English names into Russian, starting with a list of famous English football players to be linked to corresponding photos. Common patterns of the transliteration of English names into Russian were explained on the examples of footballers, which logically led to the key exercise of the workshop – all children and accompanying teachers were asked to try their hand at writing their own names in Russian on name badges. Instructors helped each participant individually, ensuring that everyone left the workshop with their own name tag in Russian.

‘My Kalinka’: Introduction to Russian culture
A parallel workshop, run by Elizabeth Ovcinikova, was aimed at a concise and playful introduction to Russia’s geography, culture and cuisine. The first task took participants on a journey across the country – they had to count the multicoloured stipes representing time zones and make stops at different cities while estimating how long their journeys took. The next quiz compared Russia and the UK in nine different areas, from elementary ones (such as what language is spoken in the country or what is its capital city) to more advanced questiosn (such as what its national currency was or what were its neighbouring countries).

The last two questions of the quiz – on the respective nations' most popular sport and drink – were identical for both countries, namely football and tea, which shifted the participants from identifying cultural differences to recognising the similarities between the two countries. The introduction of tea as a national drink of Russia raised, however, also the question of tea-drinking cultur, with the task of guessing which ingredients would go into a perfect cup à la Russe (namely, lemon, raspberry jam or honey, but not milk!). A short video about one of the emblems of Russian traditional tea-drinking culture, the samovar (a large metal teapot), was followed by a quiz on other traditionally ‘Russian’ cultural objects – Russian dolls (matrioshki), winter felt boots (valenki), etc.

The next step introduced the concept of a ‘twin city’ and Durham’s twin city from Russia, Kostroma. The children were asked to find as many parallels between these two towns as they could. Two final workshop activities were rather more dynamic: they included designing ‘World Cup’ Russian dolls and learning how to sing and dance the Russian folk tune ‘Kalinka-Malinka’, which was first demonstrated by the instructor, but then engaged everyone in the room.

The day finished with lunch while watching Russian-language cartoons, the famous Nu, Pogodi! (Just You Wait!). A short concluding session summed up what the children had learned over the day and introduced another key word, ‘Udachi!’ (‘Good luck!'), which was then addressed to the England team who played their semifinal match that same evening. Follow-up handouts with activities on the World Cup cities in Russia were given to the school teachers to be distributed later and completed at home. These were designed to build on the skills acquired during the workshops: basic recognition of the Russian alphabet and a general familiarity with the map of Russia and the location of its main cities. A couple of days after the event a parcel with handmade thank-you cards from the children was delivered to Durham University. These portrayed the creative ways in which the pupils of Whytrig Middle School perceived the event and interpreted the skills and information they were presented with.