Our fastly changing world challenges nursery schools to apply new methods on the field of healthcare and health development. Our aim is to highlight enviromental consciousness, especially, health consciousness in nursery school’s developmental plans. We believe that the harmful phenomena in our environment can be changed only by altering the attitudes towards our environmental conditions focusing on a healthy way of living. We find particularly important to maintain children’s mental health and self-improvement through arts. Tales, music, dance and drama are necessary for emotional, mental and social development. This project alows to form health culture and emotional security in children with special needs and social disadvantages by offering circumstances that encourage creativity through different forms of arts. Having more information on health-developing aims, methods and programs of Hungarian-speaking nursery schools our developmental strategies can be enriched and strengthened thus may contribute to spreading good practices. The ideas, methods, topics seen elsewhere help our work and can be part of our everyday practice. Skilled and experienced nursery school teachers can easier co-operate with schools and assist to smooth transition from nursery to primary school. Taking part in cultural events we have a chance to focus attention on the importance of health and specifically, mental health (“Healthy spirit in healthy body”).The aquired knowledge, collected ideas, methods and experiences within the co-operation and the handbooks that were put together during earlier projects will give the basis for a new, innovative program neccesary to form a healthy personality of children. (Health development without limits – [HELP- Hungarian abreviation])The program will be available in printed and digital version as well. Opening up the project to other institutions, planned workshops, joint events and conferences serve to share certain elements of the program. Publications, sharing videos on the web, creating a common website to present the details of the two-year co-operation to the general public may help to make the project’s ideas more widely available.
Our professional motivation is: sustainability – we have been realising cooperation with transborder native Hungarian kindergartens since 2010. Our projects were consciously built upon one other originating from real necessities; all our partners followed our aims incorporating sustainability; we dealt with different environmentally-conscious behaviour forms based on environmentally friendly and conscious educational strategies. We have created the healthy lifestyle attitude; then under the influence of family impact assessments as well as the experience of our partners (the number of tensed and misbehaved children is constantly increasing; kindergartens have to face more and more responsibility; different and changed society, parents, values) our HELP programme dealt with complex health supporting projects including nature related, physical, psychological health protection. The innovation factor was the protection of the children’s psychological health combined with their emotional development in a way that we relied on our previous results and we used up the different types of tools of arts with the distinct intention of rethinking them and applying new ways of the art-provided opportunities (games, tales, drama, music, dance, delineation). Tales, music, dance, drama are indispensible for the healthy development of emotional, psychological, intellectual and social development. One of the aims of the project was the creation of the children’s emotional safety within family and kindergarten environment as well as in parental cooperation. Together with the educators of five partner institutions we have managed to compensate disadvantages, supported talent, carried out the protection of our children’s physical and psychological health, all on the basis of equal opportunities and the principles of inclusive pedagogy. We also assisted parents’ familial education (‘School of Parents’), enriched our educators’ methodological arsenal and protected their physical health. Our partners represent very similar values to ours; their experience gained in the previous Comenius Project, the team work that has been practised over the past few years immensely contributed to project work. The contact point is Hungarian language through which we were able to let our children participate in the communication through video messages and meetings; we were confirmed in our national identity and realised its importance. The principal of equal opportunities accompanied the whole project, however, the inclusion of the disabled, the acceptance of being different, the principle of inclusion had priority. (‘Health on the Move!’, ‘Paraolimpics’, ‘Clean Water!’, ‘Angel Factory’, ‘Playhouse’). The respect and integration of traditions and folk values became part of our daily routine. On international meetings we got to know the aims of the Hungarian-speaking kindergartens, their innovative methods, their programmes for psychological protection, therefore our work became more colourful and increased with new contents enabling our institutions to improve and spread good practices. In our courses we showed and experienced both in theory and practice the complex impact of music and tale on children; our presenters were well-prepared and respected professionals. Our activity served both widening and sharing knowledge with the participation of the educators of the town in charge of the organisation. The experienced ideas, topics, remakes have become of our every day routine. The professionalism of the educators aided the transition between kindergarten and school and strengthened partnership. Participating cultural events we managed to draw attention to the importance of health, especially the importance of psychological health (“Healthy spirit in healthy body”). The ideas, methods, experience collected within the cooperation, together with the knowledge gained on the courses and the handbooks from the previous projects served as the basis for the new and innovative programme on health education (Health development without limits - ‘HELP’ in short). It is available in both written and digital form and is flavoured with multiculturalism. We opened the project to other institutions and invited the local kindergartens into the realization phase (’Tale Competition’, ’Drawing Projects’, ’Children’s Day’,’Workshop Day for Educators’). Local organizations assisted our children’s expansion of knowledge; our programmes (‘Run a Circle!’, ‘Kindergarten Olympics’), conferences (’TKA-dissemination training’, ’Project Writing Day’, Erasmus+ Csepp project) served as the introduction of the topics/thematical units. In 2017 our coordinator presented the ongoing international practice in kindergartens, the high standard project work with small children. Our publications, short films, the follow-up of the two-year-long project activity shared on a common website means the sustainability of the project.