Pupils are getting more and more inactive and health costs are rising - that is what we want to change! This intention corresponds with goals of the European Commission which propagates a healthy and holistic way of life. So students at the age from 13 to 15 years should be enabled to develop different ways of doing healthy sports autonomously together with like-minded people. This project aims at supporting the process of detachment from authority figures by giving young people the chance to plan and conduct their actions on their own. The focus is not on the physical aspect of sports, but on the possibilities of integration, socialisation and tolerance. Technically challenging kinds of sports, expensive equipment or gyms are considered to be redundant, so that the costs are not so high and everybody can afford. The role of the teachers is to give advice, but pupils have to take care about the equipment, time-management, planning a route and so on. According to that we put emphasis on including a huge variety of places in order to guarantee an enormous range of sporty acitivites. So in Finland we would like to focus on winter sports like cross-country skiing and ice-skating as well as dancing, in Cyprus on sports by the sea, in Germany on using the Alpine foothills as the setting for bike tours and hiking. In Spain we plan to go on a pilgrimage, in Lithuania canoeing will be in the foreground. The students of each country will organize one or two activities where the international partners will take part. After visiting every partnerschool can modify the arrangements of these activities for their own possibilities. Additionally pupils are going to work on a further kind of sports between the short-term exchanges organized for the whole school community. All these activities will be documented by videofilms, protocols, pictures etc., so that difficulties, risks or special needs will be found out. Students report in English about our activities for Twinspace and for the common project homepage. At the same time they also work continuously on the material in their own languages. Thus there will be one common English version of our guidebook, as well as a version in the own language of each participant school which needs not to be completely identical for all countries. Also the aim of the project is to arouse the pupils' sense of responsibility for their own health. Nothing is more appropriate than healthy sports to convey a feeling for one's own body and sensitivity for one's own necessities. Despite attending all-day schools young people today have mostly a lot of free time at their disposal, which should be spent meaningfully and not in front of their computers only. By being confronted with our project they will gain the competences to organize their leisure time in a physically active way and to integrate activity in their scheme of life. You can easily get in touch with others, even foreign people via sports activity. Language barrieres will be overcome and tolerance increases, as well as social and personal competences. Good or bad habits spread easily nuclear reaction speed through our society. What way it will go depends on us, all people. We can not deny, the results may be different more or less for every individual person. But on the whole we will certainly have more healthy pupils who will grow up showing example to live healthy life to their own children and friends.Moreover, the project aims at raising young people's awareness for nature in all its facets (weather, flora and fauna, geography) and for their surroundings. You will only be able and willing to protect the world around you and to fight for its continued existence if you know about the beauty of your natural environment. It is especially on an international level that we can see that environmental protection needs to be global in order to be successful.All the results and documentations will be published on eTwinning, on the different websites of the schools and in a book including a DVD, so that further generations of teachers and students have an idea and advice how to organize such sporty events. The translation in the different languages have the effect, that students will identify very easily with the project product - the book. They can feel like authentic authors of the guidebooks and really everybody can use the information comfortably. Contact boards in every school will support the process of getting in touch with like-minded people. Also we want to give our results to the governments to initiate a new optional subject "health education" and to inform other schools within teaching and training activities.
Teaching physical education at a bavarian Gymnasium we see more and more that teenagers move less and less and do no more sports if they are not engaged in a Club doing ball games or other competition sports. This lack of movement is getting worse with the increasing use of electronical media. So health problems appear in very young age already. The main aim of our project was to improve the awareness of the young people for the need of movement and sports for their health, find some possibilities around the school . Our students should also learn what sports are good for health and organize those activities on their own. They should exchange their experiences with students in other European countries and see that there are different possibilities and climate in other regions of Europe. That is why 5 schools from Lithuania, Spain, Finland, Cyprus and Germany worked together on this project. Those were common secundary schools in Lithuania, a very small school, and in Finnland, a school which our School already knows from a former Comenius-project. The Spanish school is a private catholic school until secondary classes. In Cyprus and Germany the schools were Gymnasien. At all participating schools sports activities besides the P.E. lessons have been organized. and students learnt about the importance of movement for health. Depending on climate and circumstances the activities varied: in Finland they did more winter sport, Cypriots moved on the beach or did hiking. In Spain there were also hiking excursions in the mountains, in Bavaria we were biking, jogging, skating and cross country skiing in winter. In Lithuania healthy sports also for parents are obligatory in the curriculum, so they already move a lot. They even did kayaking there. in winter the schools tried yoga, dancing and circle training. At least one information evening per school was organized for the whole school and the parents concerning healthiness and sports. In the German school this information evenening was public. Students and teachers documented all and exchanged the experiences on our platform on Yammer. For the meetings with the students mainly sporty activities were planned and done. Finnland offered sauna, dancing and a wintersport day for all guests and the whole school. In Lithuania all students and teachers made an exciting excursion in tandem kajaks. In stead of the tents everyone spent the night in the gym, because of the rain. There was also one sports day with beach-volleyball, dart, basketball and football. In Germany we had ball games and a night in a house on top of a mountain in the Alps. In Spain everyone did a part of the famous Jacobs-path and we also had a hiking tour in the mountains after spending the night in a jouth hostel at the bottom. The students and the teachers who went to the Meetings have not only seen the country and the people there, they also saw different possibilities and difficulties in another country and a different climate above all. All have taken part in a new and different sport activity that they did not do before. Students and teachers exchanged their experiences. At every school participating in the project was a rich experience, above all in Cyprus, Spain and Lithuania where the schools are very small and where really the whole school family was involved. The spanish school even prepared a whole "European week" due to our Erasmus- Project during the Meeting at their school. At the bavarian School there was a so called "P-Seminar" concerning our theme. The participating students worked our different freetime sport activities and they tried them out, documented the results and informed all students about the pathes for biking for example. In addition to the common English book about the project every participating school has printed a project book in their own language so that the experiences and the results of the project can be more effective. All participating schools deciced to continue to offer and do freetime sports also in the future, and not only during the P.E. lessons. All school plan an information board so that those proposals can be offered to all students.