Hello Europe! Our first window on Europe

On 15 October all five classes of our primary school “Don Lorenzo Milani” in San Marino di Bentivoglio – the whole school site, 67 pupils – move through seven language stations set up along the school corridor. Every child carries a passport: at each station they hear a greeting, repeat it and get a stamp. Six stations are European countries – Italy ciao, Germany hallo, France bonjour, Spain hola, Finland hei, Sweden hej – and the seventh one is ours: the nine home languages spoken by the children in our classes, presented by the children who speak them. The morning ends in the entrance hall, where the five class panels are joined into a single wall: one school, many languages. It is our first documented plurilingual pathway, and it puts the languages of Europe and the languages the children already bring from home on the same level.

Our school, Istituto Comprensivo di San Giorgio di Piano (Bologna, Italy), applied for Erasmus+ accreditation (KA120) in September 2026, with a four-year plan built on English as a working language, CLIL in primary school and plurilingualism as a stable European dimension across all our school sites.

We are looking for partner schools – in particular in Finland, Sweden, Spain and France – for a project on plurilingualism and CLIL in primary education. Above all we would like to see how you work: how plurilingualism enters the ordinary school day, not only the language lesson. For us it is a lever for inclusion and for education in democratic citizenship. If this is close to what you do, please get in touch.