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I've learned a great deal about Ukraine and their culture, and I learned about professional music artists and about painters. My Journalism class and I have been writing pen pals back and forth to a class in Kyiv. The school is called Lycée Anne de Kiev. I learned about different aspects of their culture, like their types of food and drinks.  We met a musician named Brett Hill from Dayton and he has a friend named Amedee Royer, and he talked to us about his music, Ukrainian culture, and the war. He sang us a few songs and we took…

In middle school Journalism class with Ms. Ripple, we have learned many things and have made new connections with others. Something we have been working on for a long time is our Ukrainian pen pals.  There are seven people in their class and each of us has one pen pal. Their students' names are Valeria, Anastasia, Andre, Maxym, Ivan, Maria, and Kyrylo. Every week we exchange letters with them. We mostly ask questions and answer them. We talk about food, family, culture, and much more.  Earlier in the year we wrote to them and we made presentations about our school…

Since January, the students of Ms. Ripples' journalism class has been writing to students in Ukraine. Sounds crazy, right? While there are frequent air raids, they will write to us in bomb shelters. And we will make new connections, and learn what life is like across an ocean.  “I’ve learned to have a lot of sympathy for our friends. It makes us realize how lucky we have it,”  King said. When they have shared information about the war, they talk about how it is always scary during air raids. Even one of the student’s dad is 3-D printing missiles to…

In a war torn and foreign country, you’d expect everything to be different, but some things in Ukraine are more similar to here than you’d think.  Federal Hocking’s MS Journalism class has been writing back and forth with students in Kyiv, which is Ukraine’s capitol.  “This experience has been really eye-opening,”  Sebastian, who is a pen-pal of Maksym and Andrey, said.   Beginning in January 2024, Ms. Ripple’s MS Journalism class began writing back and forth with an English class in the Lycée Français Anne de Kiev, a French language school in Kyiv. Students have exchanged both written and typed letters,…