AMA la girafe: A modern, digital and educational correspondence for children aged 4 to 11
As part of its awareness-raising activities in schools, ODDY-C collaborates with AMA the giraffe in order to create a social link between French-speaking Belgian nursery and primary schools and to open up pupils from an early age to diversity and interculturality within Belgium and the rest of the French-speaking world. AMA is a pedagogical tool that creates intercultural class pairs. On the AMA digital platform, two classes from two different schools are brought together. The pupils go on an adventure and share their experiences in the form of photo reports, drawings or videos. This pedagogical tool aims to reinforce the essential and transversal competences of the pupils: intercultural, citizenship, creative, emotional and digital intelligence competences. This pedagogical tool also allows teachers and their pupils to develop some of the skills linked to the new reference frameworks:
– Language awareness (paying attention to sound, song, rhythm and accents, understanding the richness of others and their cultures, identifying the socio-cultural elements that guarantee effective communication)

– Education in philosophy and citizenship (putting our daily lives and our world into perspective, discovering other ways of living together and understanding different realities, playing an active role in building a better way of living together: “A school must not be built as a succession of islands” Bruno Humbeeck.

As part of its support to the deployment of AMA the Giraffe in schools, ODDY-C responded to a call for projects from the Wallonia-Brussels Federation: School democracy and citizen activities. A grant of 17.945,50 EUR was obtained to implement the project in 100 classes in French-speaking Belgium between January and June 2023.

The AMA project team will have the opportunity to visit volunteer schools to conduct thirty AMA workshops in classrooms on the themes of interculturality, super powers and the school outside. These workshops will help teachers to become familiar with the IYA tool and inspire the teaching teams and their students. These field trips will also have the merit of exchanging good practices between the different participating schools. The workshops will be prepared in advance of the classroom visit and will last one hour. The IYA team will also organise physical meetings between the paired classes for about ten participating schools.

Apart from the opportunities for contact with the AMA team facilitators, teachers are free to go on adventures and organise AMA time in class either in the form of an AMA moment where the teacher shares with his or her pupils the adventures of their pair, or the teacher organises an adventure for his or her class on a new theme (chosen from among the themes proposed on the platform), or in a more natural way, when the pupils do an activity that deserves to be shared with their pair group, they invite AMA to participate.