Imagination is the greatest wealth that a person can have. We believe that if you can imagine something , you can achieve it. Dreaming is much more important than the knowledge itself. Einstein said “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” As he said, fairy tales have a great role on children in undrestanding life , the shaping of personality and the way they will follow in the future. They contribute children in being creative ,innovative and entrepreneur, socializing, language development, integration into society and its values, being positive in life, being sensitive to the environment and animals, having a critical point of view to the events, understanding the difference between good and bad also right and wrong, staying away computer and television addiction and also the auditory, cognitive, and psycho-social development. Taking all of these advantages of fairy tales we create our project. Our motto is TO BE OR NOT TO BE A HERO. Our main goal is to make children imagine without fear and share it with people, so self confident creative, innovative, entrepreneur and prescient individuals can grow. For example, Atatürk,a national hero, wouldn’t be a qualified leader and prescient statesman if he didn’t follow his dream. Furthermore, recognizing the fairy tales from different cultures and the common subjects such as love, peace and friendship, we want to generate a cultural interaction among people. Moreover, taking advantage of the unifying characteristics of fairy tales we want to destroy the prejudices against different people so, we can show that all children are brothers without distinction of religion, race, color or language. With the help of international trips, different cultures will be recognized so international cultural relations can be established and new perspectives can be provided about Europe. Additionally, the trips will have contributions to the teachers' professions. The participants of the transnational trips consists of teachers . The classroom teachers know the children psychologhy and inner world well,furthermore the foreign language teachers will help the project in literature and dramatizations. There will be 6 transnational meetings and 73 mobilities with in the scope of the project. The target group of the activities includes students, teachers and parents of the partner schools.The activities includes seminars and meetings about the project, reading, telling, completing open-ended tales, dramatizations of fairy tales, putting yourself instead of the fairy-tale character, improving critical thinking abilities, watching films on fairy tales and heroes, the festivals of real and fairy tale heroes, reveal the hero within contest, making an albume of the contest results and exhibition of the products, writing own fairy tale using the created characters in the contest, at last, making a book of selection of written fairy tales. During the project, reading, verbal,visual expression,dramatization, question-answer and brain storming methods will be used. As a result, the target group, recognizing both own and the other heroes in Europe, will be able to increase cultural accumulation and build intercultural bridges. They will also identify the characteristics of lived heroes who pursued his/ her dream and succeed. As a result of the Project, searching, reading, increacing curiosity, expressing the thoughts, emphatizing abilities are stressed. The development of the world of imagination will be supported and creating own hero activities will guide to show the limitless imagination power. Moreover, foreign language skills will be supported by the communication with the project partners from different countries. The expected effects of the Project are increasing curiosity and willingless to learn foreign language , supporting reading habits, colouring the world of imagination, encouraging in achieving their dreams, allowing them to see the virtuous behavour in both real and fantastic heroes, besides, the ability to overcome the problems of daily life will be shown by demonstrating critical thinking ways. The Project also have affects on raising awareness of peace, love, tolerance and friendship among cultures as well as on noticing the innovative characteristics and entrepreneurship of students through implementation activities. It will also impact on the professional development of the teachers. When disseminating the Project , activities previously carried out will become traditional activities such as festivals, watching films about heroes or creating hero contests. The project corner will be remained. Additionally the dissemination activities will be published in the open, accessable and updated website therefore anyone can apply this project at their institution. Social media pages will also help in disseminating the project.
One day we asked Albert Einstein how we could make our children smarter. His answer was both simple and wise. "If you want your children to be intelligent," he said, "read them fairy tales. If you want them to be smarter, read them more fairy tales. " This sentence is the gateway to our reflection. Our objectives were to bathe the children for two years with the contact of storytellers, storybooks, shows, particular places but also stories of fictional or real heroes of our country but also, of course, of all our partners. We wanted to allow children to open up to imaginary and real worlds in many ways, we wanted to make them dream, to make them grow. Through the analysis of all these encounters, we wanted to gradually decode these heroes and to remove the values they convey in order to become, in turn, heroes who convey the values encountered. We also wanted to produce our own shows, our own storybook, our own exhibits in different schools. The six organizations (Belgium, Turkey, Portugal, Italy, Poland and Bulgaria) participated from the outset. The 6 organizations were solicited during the writing of the project. They were primary and nursery schools. The profiles of the schools were very similar: number of children, mixed, inland, not tourist, semi-urban or urban, .... The main activities implemented: Website: it was mentioned that our site lacked some consistency. I can also conceive it, but this site is, at least in part, built by children aged 10-12 years. They have the power to choose the "look" of it as well as what must be there. The use of IWeb (not now commercialized) has made this possible with regard to the user-friendliness of this application. The more than 300,000 page views for 6 years are a real pride. www.comenius2011.com Setting up a show for children and parents: children aged 5-8 and their teachers have put together a show featuring the characters encountered during the reading of new books that appeared in the various libraries of the school. This show was seen by the entire school community to know more or less 1500 people. Invitation of storytellers: professional storytellers were invited with proposals tailored to each age group, including parents. Meeting of contemporary heroes: at each meeting, the host country allowed us to meet a local hero. On returning to the schools, the story of this hero was shared with some of the children. Setting up a survey on the reading habits of our students: at a transnational meeting, a questionnaire was constructed, the survey was carried out among all the children of the 6 schools, the results were centralized and Analyzed (graphs) during a second transnational meeting. These results are shared on the site and on the platform. But also ... The hero of our dreams in 3D Establishment of exhibitions in schools Writing and illustration of a tale Finally ... Production of a book: a little the symbol of our work ... This book takes up tales written and illustrated by children from all countries. These tales are available in English and in the language of the producers. In view of the established program, the circumstances and the intermediate evaluation, we have at a transnational meeting adapted our program to be more realistic. This redesign was beneficial for our second year activities and for the organization of our meetings. The results achieved correlate with our initial objectives at least 80%. The cultural and geographical specificities have sometimes been a brake but only in specific cases. The productions of children and adults were very numerous and of very good quality. During the two years, we were able to keep our enthusiasm and work in parallel according to the established schedule. All countries sent their production to the coordinator on time. This made it possible to impact the actors (children and adults) of the different schools in a very regular way. The quality of the proposed works permitted pedagogical exploitation in the different schools. In the long term, it is clear that the different actors in the school (organizing authority, director, 100% of teachers, 90% of parents and 100% of children) are convinced of the interest of this type of project. All want continuity on the one hand by introducing a new project and on the other hand by maintaining contacts with the schools already encountered.