Six pre-schools and primary schools (from Spain, Italy, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Portugal and France) will help with their own experience to provide new methodologies and to make the competencies more efficient in order to implement a work based in projects: The European reference framework (Strategies «Europe 2020») has achieved a consensus regarding the objectives of the European educational systems: our students need to achieve the core competences at the end of their mandatory education so as to evolve efficiently in a constantly changing society and to build a participatory and democratic future. These are THE KEY COMPETENCES. The competency-based approach consists of a learning that is more specific, more active and more durable. This is one of the key elements of the current reforms, which aim to adapt the schools to the needs of our time. This new European educational movement is ACCOMPANIED by the need of a methodological change within the different schools that take part in this partnership. The necessity for these changes is linked to the loss of motivation and the low academic performance of the students, which is visible, in a way, thanks to the indicators, the evaluations and the reports conducted in different educational levels. Furthermore, even if the different schools of the partnership are already familiarized with the teaching skills of the projects and the competency-based teaching, they feel the need to renew their practices and to spread them more widely specially to all the new teachers joining their teams each year. For all these reasons, we would like to share our innovative practices and implement new learning methodologies in our classes so as to make a significant improvement in the results and the motivation of our students. These changes in our practices will have a great impact on the whole educating community. Therefore, we want to develop a project that relies on a COMPETENCY-BASED LEARNING THROUGH PROJECT-ORIENTED WORKS in pre-schools and primary schools. In order to optimize the competency-based learning, it is necessary to implement new active and contextualized methodologies. These will ease the participation and involvement of our students and the acquisition and usage of knowledge in real situations, as well as generate new durable and transferable learning processes. Interactive strategies are more appropriate in competency-based learning processes, since they allow us to share and build knowledge and to stimulate the classes through a verbal exchange and collective ideas. Regarding to methodology, the WORK PROJECTS can be an answer to the development of basic competences in pre-schools and primary schools. The key idea of our project is that the academic success in children requires a collaboration of all those who care about their learning process. They need to learn to get to know themselves better and to value their own competences. We want to face the challenge of a pre-school and a primary school in partnership with families and colleagues, within a team of motivated educational teams. During the life cycle of the project, the work will be oriented through the acquisition of enough knowledge so as to allow the practical application of the PROJECT-ORIENTED work and different stunning and innovative methodologies in order to work on the KEY COMPETENCIES in a different way. Within the two-year life cycle of the project, the efforts will also be focused on a PROJECT-ORIENTED METHODOLOGY OF THE WORK. This will put into practice all the knowledge on the key competences to complete successfully this new methodology. Four shared working projects will be undertaken in the engaged schools (two in pre-school and two more in primary school) and four projects of free choice (two in pre-school and two in primary school) will also be undertaken during the two-year life cycle of the project. This project-oriented work will lead to the progressive suppression of textbooks, since it will be the teachers, together with the students, the ones shaping the projects of the future. Moreover, these practices will have an impact on the whole educational community.
Six european nursery and elementary schools (Spain, Italy, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Portugal and France) participated in this project aiming to put project based learning at the service of the acquisition by pupils of the key skills, as they are described in Europe 2020 strategy. In this context, teachers needed to become familiar with new methodologies allowing them to optimize their teaching.Therefore, teachers needed to acquire new skills in this particular field to use them in their teaching and then transmit them to newcomers joining the school staffs every year. Project objectives have been achieved and are listed below: Objective 1: Mutualization of innovative practices and implementation of new learning methodologies. Objective 2: Development of basic skills such as: -Development of the knowledge of the mother tongue particularly through comprehension of written texts and writing of reports and accounts. -Speaking and writing skills in a foreign language by writing to pupils of partner schools in French and in English, and by recording documents then sent via the internet. Objective 3: Development of transversal skills intellectual: Pupils treat the information sent by the partner schools and must exercise their creativity to produce new documents. méthodological: The pupils use digital technologies to create documents and communicate with partner schools. Objective 4: Reinforcement of intercultural teaching. With the exponential increase of the mobility of persons from one country to another, we consider as essential to implicate pupils in project programs that will allow them to communicate with their european fellowmen. Secondary Objectives: Improvement of the communication skills through cooperation between pupils. Number/type/profile of participants Our schools are situated in semi-urban zones except for the one in Lithuania that is in a rural zone. Between 100 and 600 children attend these schools. They are nursery and elementary schools except for the Lithuanian school whose pupils are aged 1-7. Children with special needs are included in classes and each school has a specialized teacher who teaches them in small groups for designated learning sessions. A certain homogeneity can be noted in terms of socio-cultural level and of number of pupils attending. Yet there are differences when it deals with digital equipment and with the number of people working in each school. All schools are fully provided with digital tools (video projectors, computers, tablets) except for the French school that has no computer room and will wait September 2019 to have all classrooms equipped with a video projector. All schools have a good number of people working with children except for the French school where there is only one teacher in each class, which make things complicated when teachers participate in mobilities and must be replaced. Activities achieved: Mutualized Projects: The secret life of Trees and Water, source of life, source of creation. Free choice projets: School cooperative managed by the children, Manager of a day, School newsletter, Short movie festival, Sponsorship of endangered animals, Recycling, Coding, Calendars, Local History. Connected Small projects: Waterday, Peace day, Books day, Tree day, Forest feast. Miscellaneous other projects : Creation and choice of a logo for the Project, Creation of a mascot by each country, Gathering of local legends and selection of one of them in each country, making of puppets related to these legends, creation of a giant book of legends, Creation of a poster presenting a national or local tradition, Writing of a tale inspired from the chosen legend, Creation of an e-book gathering the six legends and six tales, Creation of an e-book gathering the different traditions, Creation of “Anna’s Book”, completed after each mobility, Making of a snakes and ladders game by each school and of another common one. Communication: Creation of a website, Creation of a blog by each school, Creation of a Facebook page, of an E-twinning page and of a What’s app group. All results emanate from a Project based pedagogy. Each final product results from activities simultaneously led by teachers. The impact on the school community was very strongChildren were very receptive and much more motivated because more active and giving sense to their school work. Teachers have shown more and more interested throughout the two years and have brought some changes to their way of teaching, creating new habits in their way to prepare their teachings.