Coláiste Chiaráin, Croom, has been named Ireland’s national winner of this year’s European Charlemagne Youth Prize. The Irish jury, Deirdre Clune, MEP, Brian Hayes, MEP and Sarah Haslam, Foróige, selected the project ‘Tedd’s Journey through Europe’ to go forward to represent Ireland at the European final in Aachen on 12th May.
As part of the school curriculum the students are studying European and Global Studies. “Our teacher wanted us to understand and experience what it means to be European; to learn about Europe, its countries, people and cultures,” explained one of the students, Eoin Hayes. “As it is not possible for us to go to each country and experience this first hand, we came up with a plan to send our class mascot Tedd to travel around Europe investigating and exploring on our behalf.
“Tedd spends a month in each country he visits gathering information. We get the opportunity in class to research the area that Tedd will be visiting and choose five things which we want Tedd to learn about or experience. The students in the school Tedd visits also show Tedd other things, most of which we would never have known by just researching on the internet. The students around Europe create detailed videos of Tedd’s adventures in their region, along with many photos and written extracts. Our website www.tedd.ie has created a unique comm-unity which is available to not only our students, but students all across Europe.”