This project has been designed thinking of our students' needs and interests. With this project, we would like to give them the opportunity to improve their communicative skills while they work with students from different backgrounds and learn from them. This project will be implemented in a context where students from different countries, cultures and ages will be working together with the objective of creating a short collection of adapted European literary works that could be used in schools around Europe. Our project aims the collaboration of students from different backgrounds in order to produce bilingual audio ebooks. The objectives are to foster team working; to thelp students to improve their communicative competence as well as other competences; to offer our students real contexts to communicate with students from different cultures and learn from them; to work specific contents from the National Curriculums in a different and motivating way and to apply everything they learn in class to a real product. This project is targeted to students aged 10 to 15 years old. Some of our students show low motivation towards English and difficulties when speaking, while some others are really motivated to learn but they don't have many opportunities to use English back home. All the activities designed for this project will target different groups of students. The project has been divided into 6 different phases and each of these phases will be carried out by a different age range. This project needs teachers with a versatail profile as we will work contents from various subjects of the national curriculums. The teachers participating in this project are specialised teachers from subjects like the national language, English, art, music or ICT. We have never participated in an Erasmus+ project before, and neither have some of our partners, although some others have previously participated in these kind of projects which will be very helpful for the rest of us. In order to get our final product, students will carry out these activities: - 1st phase: presentation of the project and procedures of working, and selection of the national books to be adapted also during this phase. These tasks will be carried out with their national language teacher. - 2nd phase: translation of the literary works and preparation for the first international meeting. These tasks will be carried out with their English teacher. - 3rd phase: students work on the illustrations of the book. These tasks will be carried out with their art teacher. - 4th phase: students work on the music for the audio-book. These tasks will be carried out with their music teacher. Students will also work on the rehearsals for the concert that will take place in Greece. - 5th phase: older students will work in the adaptation of the literary works into play stages for children, while younger ones will rehearsal for the performance of the plays in the internional meeting in Germany. - 6th phase: students will record the reading of the books (English version) The methodology we intend to apply is clearly related to the Project Based Learning in the sense that our project has a clear formative objective; it develops meaningful contents and it includes collaboration, communication, critical thinking, public presentation of the final work and usage of ICT. Our method is also based on cross-curricular approach where students learn and practice contents from various subjects. Students will be grouped taking into account the tasks. For example, for the adaptation and translation of the books students will be grouped in national teams, but from the third phase onwards the groups will be formed by students from all the nationalities mixed. The criteria to form the groups will be: age, gender, motivation, language an academic background. Apart from the concrete results obtained through the activities mentioned, we expect a wide range of results from this project. Amongst them, the most important for us is the boost on our students' communicative competence and their personal enrichment as citizens. Our students have never had an experience like this one, not only regarding the way of working but in their private life, as for many of them it would be the first time they travel abroad. This project will have an important impact mainly on the students, but also on the educational community and families. Our students will develop problem-solving skills from which they will grow helpful abitilities for their adult life. And without a doubt, the experiences will strengthen students' self-confidence and learning motivation. All the results of this project will be manteined after the end of the EU funding and used in the future. As an example, the theatre scripts will be used by future students as well as future teachers can use the lesson plans from the Teachers' Resources Book that will be ellaborated throught the project.
This project has been carried out in a context where students from very different backgrounds and cultures have worked together in order to produce a bilingual illustrated ebook with literature masterpieces of their own countries. The differences amongst partners, specially in culture and customs, were one of the incentives to work together as we all understood those differences as an opportunity to learn from each other. It has been exactly the same in terms of backgrounds. All the schools come from very different backgrounds, with many differences in terms of size, premises or even curriculums. These differences went from the German school with more than 1000 students to the Spanish school with less than 100 students; or the high technological level of the Estonian or Turkish schools against the more modest schools in Spain and Greece. We were quite ambitious when designing the project but we always relied on the variety of our expertise as our schools and students had previously worked in very different fields. For example, while Slovenian partners had experience in theatre; Germans had experience in music; Estonians were experts in educational projects; Greeks and Spanish in organising cultural and literary routes and our Turquish partners had experience in ICT programmes. All those qualities together have helped to the success of our project as we have been helping each other whenever it has been necessary. Basically, we saw that we could complement each other. The main objective of this project was to help students to improve their communicative competence, although it wasn’t the only objective. Other important goals of the project were to foster team working; to offer students real contexts to communicate with other students form different cultures and learn from each other; to work specific contents from the national curriculums in a more motivating way applying their knowledge to real situations. We can assure that all those initial objectives have been fully achieved as students were able to work with people their age and communicate in many different situations along the two years that the project lasted. Students worked in a collaborative way using online tools like Twinspace, Drive, emails or Edmodo where the vehicular language was English. Even though the number of mobilities financed were 21, we managed to get 152 students participating in the mobilities thanks to external funding. The profile of the students participating in the different mobilities varied according to the specific mobility. So, students participating in the meeting in Celje were those students who had adapted the national masterpieces and helped to the translation into English; students with a musical profile participating in the gathering in Greece; or those with more experience in acting went to Germany. We can say the same for the teachers who participated in each of the mobilities as students travelled with their English, music, Art and Drama teachers. We can divide the different activities into those specifically needed for the final product, i.e. our ebook; those carried out via eTwinning and those carried out during the different gatherings. For the first group of mentioned activities , students worked together to select the national masterpiece that would be adapted to an A2 level; they translated the adaptations into English; they drew illustrations for the final ebook, produced music for the ebook and recorded themselves reading the different ebooks in a way that each book has been read by students from different nationalities. Once the students edited and published the ebook, we continued working on the adaptation of the masterpieces to the theatre. Apart from uploading the mentioned activities to Twinspace, students shared in eTwinning other activities like video presentations of their schools; online presentations about their masterpices; video presentations with their progress while drawing the illustrations, etc. The third group of activities undertook by our students were the ones carried out over the mobilities. Amongst these activities it is worth mentioning the Reading event in a public library in Slovenia; the exhibition of the illustrations and drawing of scenaries for the different masterpieces in Estonia; the concert in Greece and the theatre performance in Germany. As mentioned above, the main result obtained has been the audio-book, although we have had many other products along the way. Some of the products that helped us to achieve our goals have had the biggest impact in our students. Special mention for the public concert that our student gave in Greece and their performance in Germany. without a doubt, for many of our students, a range of unforgateble life and travel experiences had the biggest impact. In terms of longer benefits, students from all over Europe can use our ebook, plays or reading games in their English or drama classes.