Our project arose from joint desire of making learning and teaching Maths more effective. According to deep data analysis our students are afraid of this subject, they don't have learning motivation and find Maths very difficult. Final Maths test results are below national and European average level. That's why we created our project to improve the level of key competences - especially Maths - through access to high quality innovative education and adopting teaching and learinig to surrounding reality.Math is an important tool for other subjects and everyday life, so students need to know it well. Especially students with difficulties, refugees and Romanies to get chances to integrate. Good command of key competences will help them to find the right place in the society. We want to make our students aware of importance of Maths and show the beauty and universality of this subject. Each school tried its best but only wide international coalition of different schools: private and state ones and primary and secondary teachers will enable to find novel and highly effective approach in Maths teaching and learning.Our partnership comprises primary and secondary schools from seven different countries. We wanted to have a mix of schools, situated in different areas, private and state ones from Poland, Turkey, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Cyprus and Greece."Maths in Art" project cosists of:- Getting to Know Each Other Unit- Travelling around Europe Unit- Discovering Artists from Partner Countries Unit- Finding Maths Elements in Partner Countries' Paintings Unit- Finding Maths Elements in Partner Countries' Architecture Unit- Finding Maths Elements in Partner Countries' Sculptures Unit- Finding Maths Elements in Partner Countries' Music UnitThrough this project we will improve basic skills, foster innovation in education, improve teaching and learning Maths and foreign languages, increase motivation and morale for both staff and students, particularly Romanies and refugees , students with special educational needs, and learning styles to work together on the project, develop personal and social skills and the idea of cooperation and responsibility for the common work by stimulating art methods.
With the help of this project we fully reached our objective, to enable our teachers to teach mathematics more efficiently by connecting this subject with the artistic area, and, at the same time, to decrease students´ reservation or even fear against mathematics. We could notably strengthen the basic mathematic skills of our students by this new approach. As a very prolific effect, we could evaluate our special cooperation in this very heterogeneous group of european partners, including primary and secondary schools. On the one hand we found out how educational work generally flows in different school levels in Europe, on the other hand we realized the different significance these subjects have in our partners´countries. By this means the repertoire of didactic methods could be broadened, whereas common didactic proceedings were questioned. In our Project "Maths in Arts" there were seven schools cooperating: Three Secondary Schools from Lithuania, from Greece and from Turkey. Three Primary Schools from Poland, from Italy and from Cyprus, and finally our coordinationg school which is a Primary and Secondary School. In the course of the two project years every school worked on 32 tasks of different areas (e.g. Mathematics and painters, in architecture, in music or other). The results of these tasks were exchanged and uploaded on our Blog, MathsinartErasmus.blogspot.com. Moreover and in parallel we organized our project meetings under the topics of the currently executed tasks. As a result, these meetings became a perfect platform to exchange obtained insights and at the same time, they were very useful to realize workshops for future topics. Apart from that, every partner had different tasks to save final results of our common project. In a book we collected and printed all the mathematic tasks we created and realized with our students in our schools, all the workshops were documented on DVDs, our project calendars keep records of our students´ creative jobs, there were expositions in our schools, we produced didactic helps for units and lessons and passed them around among eachother. All these recorded results are now being used in our partners´ schools and in their surroundings, so that the realized experiences can be informed and passed on to other educators. The effectiveness of the workshops and experiences with this project have been evaluated in all our partner institutions. The final activity was a commonly prepared and locally realized flashmob among our schools. It was performed in every school as a finishing activity of the school year, before the summer break.