Every teacher wishes good quality of life for his or her pupils. Literacy is an important factor of their future. During the past few years, reading skills have deteriorated in all partner countries Finland, Holland and Spain. By international cooperation we hope to be able to combine the best know-how of each participating school in order to create new, innovative methods in teaching literacy. The schools will arrange learning, training, teaching activity to each others and at the same time groups of 11 and 12 year old pupils get to travel with their teachers and study in a foreign country with their peers. It will be a magnificent opportunity to expand everyone’s view of world, cultural knowledge, tolerance and English skills. This project will have a significant impact on 54 exchanging pupils and teachers. Their participating organisations will also get their fair share of the activities and results, altogether about 1500 people (pupils, teachers, assistants, other schools staff, parents and administrative personnel). In the project the special responsibilities of each school are: 1. Muijalan koulu from Finland: Teaching literacy using literature and other authentic material. 2. Dukdalf from The Netherlands: Cooperative learning,, social emotional growth and self efficacy to support progress of literacy. 3. P.E.I Gonzales Valverde S.L.L. from Spain: Using technology (ICT, robotics, programming) in teaching reading skills. At the end of the project we hope to have increased both teachers’ and pupils’ motivation and know-how in literacy and its teaching. We also wish that by effective Europe wide dissemination many other schools will also benefit from our effort.
All teachers wish good quality of life for their pupils. Literacy is an important factor of their future.The concern of collapsing literacy and urge to be on the nerves of time regarding important future citizen skills like multiliteracy, social emotional skills and robotics were our motivation to create this project for the benefit of our pupils. The partners were Muijalan koulu from Lohja, Finland, whose speciality was literacy and literature teaching, Dukdalf from Leiden, Holland, whose speciality was social emotional skills and Colegio ADN from Murcia, Spain, whose speciality was robotics. Muijalan koulu acted as a coordinator. Every partner school had a working group of highly motivated teachers who attended Transnational Project Meetings in Finland, Holland and Spain. The schools arranged Learning, Teaching, Training activities to each other and at the same time groups of 11 and 12 year old pupils got to travel with their teachers and study in a foreign country with their peers. We had three target groups: pupils, teachers and parents. The following paragraphs describe their participation in the project. Pupils: All pupils (about 1000) performed literature tasks, hosted visitors in their schools and viewed their foreign peers' literature tasks via eTwinnning and WhatsApp. Selected groups of pupils took part in pupil exchange trips. Afterwards they presented their travel diaries and pictures to other pupils. Teachers: All teachers of the schools were somehow involved in literature exercises, hosting, travelling and telling about their trips. The working groups planned and executed the whole project and attended transnational meetings and Skype conferences. Parents: Parents followed the progress of the project in parental evenings and via schools' net channels. In the beginning of the project they answered a questionnaire considering literacy and robotics skills of their own child. Some families hosted foreign pupils in their homes and considered it a nice experience. Some of the families even had Skype calls with the host child's family back home. A questionnaire for pupils and parents about reading motivation and the usefulness of ICT skills was carried out in the beginning and at the end of the project. In the beginning the results showed that boys had a slightly weaker motivation in reading books than the girls did. A vast majority of pupils, 85 per cent, read willingly or rather willingly. 86 per cent of the pupils considered ICT skills useful. A quarter of the pupils had programming and robotics as a part of everyday school work. About a half of the pupils said that they can build a robot. In parents’ opinion about usefulness of ICT skills there was a significant dispersion. The questionnaire at the end of the project showed that the results remained the same. However, there were unfortunately fewer participants in this questionnaire, so the comparison is difficult. The Dutch have started using (as they call it) Finnish style of reading, which means more choice of pupils themselves in terms of what, where and how they read. They have expanded and renovated their school building according to Muijala style of school architecture which is an open learning environment. They have started to invest in ICT and robotics after what they have seen in Finland and Spain. Reading aloud to older pupils in classrooms has not been common in Spain, but now they considered its benefits again according to Finland’s and Holland's practises. The Spanish team found English skills utmost important. According to their own words, they felt insecure in the beginning of the project and so they intensively improved their skills which benefited us all. Both Holland and Spain found the Finnish book Hello Ruby by Linda Liukas useful and inspirating in teaching robotics and programming to small pupils. We Finns got some very useful tips about teaching robotics and social emotional learning It was a magnificent opportunity to expand everyone’s view of world, cultural knowledge, tolerance and English skills. All partner schools appreciate the obvious development of pupils and teachers as a result of this project. We have noticed that all participants have made progress and gained self confidence in English and cooperation skills. It has been remarkable how pupils are open to other cultures and new people and encouraged themselves in using English. Friendships have been made and we are sure that this kind of networking will be fruitful in the future also, it definitely will not end when the project ends. The feedback we have got from parents has been only positive. All in all, after finishing this project we can’t say that we have accomplished any ground shaking concrete results in literacy teaching to be disseminated European wide. However, we have made a great progress in our schools in educating more internationally aware pupils, teachers and parents. We all hope to have this kind of projects in the future, too.