The project The Way We Live in different Countries involves teachers and pupils from six comprehensive schools in the Czech Republic, Finland, Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Poland. The aim of the project is to introduce the participants to their own cultural habits and to present them to cultural habits of other countries throughout Europe. To ensure cultural diversity, the northern, southern and central European countries are involved. Children with their teachers will travel to the participant countries and they will cooperate on various workshops together during each of the visits. We will meet once in each country with our pupils. The participants come not only from different European countries, but also from different conditions. Some live in small village, others come from the capital city, we have participants who have experience with international projects and also those, who are taking part for the first time. We all are enthusiastic about taking part in the project and willing to learn and share our skills and experiences. There will be two teachers travelling from each school and one or two pupils, so there will come 16 - 18 visitors to every school that will host their part of the project. Additionally, there will be a group of home participants who will create the background of the workshops and take care of the foreign guests. The children will be accommodated in host families to learn as much as possible about the country they visit. the workshops will take place at the host schools, with few planned trips to visit close environment and landmarks. The activities we plan to work on are: presenting our home countries and schools (we will create presentations and posters), guide the guests around famous and interesting sights (with children as guides), learning and teaching national dances and songs, having cooking classes and learning how to prepare national dishes, having History and Geography CLIL classes and also having a methodology seminar on CLIL for teachers, studying legends and fairy tales of the host countries and creating a comic, collecting memorabilia and information during the travels and creating travel diary of each participant country, using also e-learning and teaching approach, especially with our Cyprian partners, creating a website and a Facebook site and keeping them up-to date. We believe the children will develop tolerance to diversity, higher motivation to travel and learn, healthy curiosity that is essential for increasing knowledge, improve language skills, increase their social literacy and also learn to appreciate their own culture and uniqueness of diversity, which can still be found in European cultures. We are sure that the participants will also build friendships and will keep in touch even after the project will have finished. The methods that are going to be used are: peer teaching, communicative approach, CLIL, ICT learning and teaching, Total Physical response. The expected results are: questionnaires (that will have been distributed before and after the project to help us evaluate the results and progress), a cookbook containing traditional dishes of the participant countries, a comic with national legends and fairy tales, travel diaries continuously created by the pupils during their foreign trips, CLIL lessons plans, worksheets and handouts (which will be available online for downloading and further usage), itineraries of the sightseeing trips with information about important places we are about to visits, dictionary of basic phrases in all languages of the participants, videos and pictures of the dances and songs we are going to learn and teach with lyrics, presentations and posters on the home countries, schools, housing, website and Facebook site, that will be kept up-to-date and will serve as basis for uploading the materials we are going to create. The website will be used even after the project will have finished as it can be updated with the follow-up information about how the materials form the project are used, and what changes has the project lead to at our schools. We hope that the project will have impact not only on the direct participants but also on family and friends, the local schools and will help to raise awareness of local people about the schools and education level. It can inspire other teachers to try a similar cooperation as well, therefore, after the project, we would like to share our experiences via seminars, meetings with parents and school partners and dissolve the information about the project in local media and our school webs.
The project The Way We Live in different Countries involved teachers and pupils from six comprehensive schools in the Czech Republic, Finland, Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Poland. As Poland quit the partnership, we remained five countries. The aim of the project was to introduce the participants to their own cultural habits and to present them to cultural habits of other countries throughout Europe. To ensure cultural diversity, the northern, southern and central European countries were involved. Children with their teachers travelled to the participant countries and they cooperated on various workshops together during each of the visits. We met once in each country with our pupils. The participants came not only from different European countries, but also from different conditions. Some live in small villages, others come from the capital city, we had participants who have experience with international projects and also those, who were taking part for the first time. We all were enthusiastic about taking part in the project and willing to learn and share our skills and experiences. There were two or three teachers travelling from each school and two to four pupils, so there came 100 visitors to all mobilities. Additionally, there was a group of home participants who created the background of the workshops and took care of the foreign guests. The children were accommodated in host families to learn as much as possible about the country they visited. As Cyprus didn’t bring students to mobilities, the guest students were accommodated in hotels during the meeting in Cyprus. The workshops took place at the host schools, with few planned trips to visit close environment and landmarks. The activities we planned to work on were: presenting our home countries and schools (we created presentations and posters), guided the guests around famous and interesting sights (with children as guides), learning and teaching national dances and songs, having cooking classes and learning how to prepare national dishes, having History and Geography CLIL classes , studying legends and fairy tales of the host countries and creating a comic, collecting memorabilia and information during the travels and creating travel diary of each participant country, using also e-learning and teaching approach, especially with our Cyprian partners, creating an etwinning space and a Facebook group and keeping them up-to date. During the first transnational mobility, we decided to create an etwinning space instead of a project website, and however the results of the project were posted on each school website.We believe the children developed tolerance to diversity, higher motivation to travel and learn, healthy curiosity that is essential for increasing knowledge, improved language skills, increased their social literacy and also learned to appreciate their own culture and uniqueness of diversity, which can still be found in European cultures. We are sure that the participants also built friendships and will keep in touch even after the project finished. The methods that are going to be used are: peer teaching, communicative approach, CLIL, ICT learning and teaching. The results were: questionnaires (that were distributed before and after the project to help us evaluate the results and progress), a cookbook containing traditional dishes of the participant countries, a comic with national legends and fairy tales, travel diaries continuously created by the pupils during their foreign trips, CLIL lessons plans, worksheets and handouts (which were available online for downloading and further usage), itineraries of the sightseeing trips with information about important places we visited, dictionary of basic phrases in all languages of the participants, videos and pictures of the dances and songs we learned and taught with lyrics, presentations and posters on the home countries, schools, housing, etwinning and Facebook group, that were kept up-to-date and served as basis for uploading the materials we created. The etwinning space will be used even after the project finished as it can be updated with the follow-up information about how the materials form the project are used, and what changes has the project led to at our schools. The project had impact not only on the direct participants but also on family and friends, the local schools and helped to raise awareness of local people about the schools and education level. It can inspire other teachers to try a similar cooperation as well, therefore, after the project, we would like to share our experiences via seminars, meetings with parents and school partners and dissolve the information about the project in local media and our school webs.