The Erasmus+ project "Essential Life Skills” will be conducted in the partnership of six secondary schools from Poland, Finland, Greece, Italy, Lithuania and Slovakia. The aim of the project is to cooperate and share the learning and teaching knowledge and experiences in the field of practical life skills – a subject often neglected in the schools’ academically-oriented curricula. This way, we intend to equip teenage students with certain life skills and key competences, in order to prepare them for successful, self-efficient adulthood. The three main areas of life skills that the project focuses on are: daily living skills, personal and social skills and occupational skills. Those life skills will be obtained by the students during work in the schools’ Essential Life Skills Groups, as well as during their learning/teaching and training activities. Our cooperation is a result of previous project cooperation, as well as partner search on eTwinning platform and social networking devoted to Erasmus+ partnerships. After establishing common goals and needs, we designed basic framework and guidelines for the project and began working on the application form. The project is designed for a two-year period during which we will cooperate both virtually and personally in order to achieve our objectives. In each partner school we will establish Essential Life Skills Groups, in which students and teachers will work together and study on the project subjects. The Groups will work together using social networks, the internet, online calls, project website etc. The students and teachers will also have the opportunity to work together during 5 Learning/Teaching/Training short-term student and teacher events. During them, the participants will have an opportunity to work on the given subjects and to practice their foreign language and teamwork skills. The students and teachers’ work and studies in the given countries will focus on the following topics: Healthy nutrition, Self-management, Home economics, Career orientation. There will also be three transnational project meetings for the coordinators and teachers held during the project duration. They will monitor the general schedule of the project, clarify and supervise the evaluation criteria for the implementation and assessment of the project, its final products and the contribution of the project to the students' key competences. The management team will also overview the distribution of the project tasks among all the partners, the course of all the activities and the means of project dissemination. The project coordinators together with all the participating teachers will be in charge of the formal course of the project and the rest of tasks is completed by the students. Thanks to this international cooperation students will gain practical life skills necessary for everyday existence, which our young learners often lack. Moreover, they will obtain cross-cultural awareness and personal experience in the project areas, which will broaden their minds and abilities as well as their communication and language skills. The project will be beneficial not only for the students but also for the teaching staff. They will learn and share good practices, experience and knowledge with their peers from other countries. Moreover, they will communicate and cooperate with all the partners when working on the project. With our project, we expect the following outcomes: Tangible results will be, among others, a project website with all the information about the project and its results (e.g. lesson plans, posters, presentations, videos etc.) that will be continuously updated, a detailed guidebook on practical life skills for both students and teachers, all the outcomes obtained during LTT activities (photos, reports etc.). Intangible results of the project will be students’ and teachers' knowledge, skills and experience gained during project work. Throughout the whole project all the partners will stay in contact, providing each other with help and support.
Project "Essential Life Skills” was conducted in the partnership of secondary schools from Poland, Greece, Italy, Lithuania and Slovakia. The aim of the project was to cooperate and share the knowledge and experiences in the field of practical life skills; to equip teenage students with certain life skills and key competences, in order to prepare them for successful, self-efficient adulthood. The three main areas of life skills the project focused on were: daily living skills, personal/social skills and occupational skills. Those life skills were obtained by the students during LTT activities as well as between them, during their work in the schools’ ELS Groups. ESL students and teachers took part in four LTT events: LTT event C1 took place in Volos, Greece and the topic was: Healthy Nutrition. Main objectives of the mobility were: promoting a “pro-healthy food” attitude among teenagers; making them discover the benefits of healthy diet. The objectives were achieved through: presentations, interactive tutorials; educational visits to local institutions specializing in the “Science Of Food”,demonstrating the basics of nutrition, ingredients and food handling; lectures led by specialists, clarifying notions on healthy dietary habits, obesity and active lifestyle. LTT event C2 took place in Silale, Lithuania, the topic was Career Guidance. Main objectives of the mobility were: Developing students’ career searching and self-knowledge skills, e.g. how to use a job interview to show all good qualities; how to create the best CV. All the objectives were achieved by taking part in lectures and workshops during which the knowledge, skills and know-how were explained to students; action-based learning, working in teams and analysing the results and methods of the job done as well as contribution and process of working of each participant; project-based learning – gaining the knowledge in practical way, benefiting from experience of real businesspeople, the experts in topic areas. LTT event C4 took place in Zilina, Slovakia and the topic was Home economics. Main objectives of the event: teaching project participants to plan home budget; making them understand banking products and right financial decisions. All the objectives were met due to a series of lectures and workshops focused on bank products and home economics and led by financial experts, visits in banks, teamwork on solving financial problems. LTT event C5 took place in Nidzica, Poland and the topic was: Self-development and good manners. Main objectives of the meeting: self-improvement of students and teachers in the following areas: managing stress and fears, developing assertiveness, self-confidence, good manners and polite behaviour. The objectives were achieved through the series of activities, workshops and lectures led by experts such as phD psychologist, personal development coach and visits and workshops in wellness studio Harmonium. Another target group of the project were teachers. The objective was to enrich their personal and professional workshop with new working tools and methodologies. They took part in LTT event C3 in Afragola, Italy and the topic was: How to teach Life Skills. They took part in lectures and workshops on teaching students various life skills. They also created various lesson plans on those subjects that were included in the school curricula and serve as guidance for their peers when it comes to teaching life skills topics. ELS participants also worked actively between mobilities on, e.g. organising dissemination events, such as for instance ELS Days, meetings with students from local schools, organising meetings with their schoolmates and conducting lessons for them to pass newly gained knowledge. ELS Groups’ members were also responsible for creating tangible results, such as ELS Guidebook. Due to all those activities, our students gained and/or developed new digital competences, social and civic competences such as: critical thinking, team work. Students developed sense of initiative and entrepreneurship involving know-how, motivation, creativity, innovation and courage, as well as the ability to plan and perform tasks in order to achieve set goals. They got necessary skills and knowledge on what constitutes a healthy diet, basic rules of cooking and preparing their own healthy dishes. They learnt to understand the finances and financial products, to arrange mortgage, loans, insurance or advantageous financial investment, to calculate the income, make good financial decisions. ELS members developed assertiveness, teamwork, self-confidence, good manners and polite behaviour, they learnt to control stress. Teachers got to know and practice various teaching methods in the topic of life skills. Transnational cooperation gave everyone unique opportunity to cooperate in English which improved participants’ knowledge of English and allowed them to get a glimpse of history and culture of partner countries.