Let's Learn To Read, Let's Read To Learn

The project objective was to evolve the literacy and creative potential of students and expand their knowledge of history and cultural heritage of the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. There were four transnational learning activities planned in this project. The last one was implemented online. They included literary-focused day-tours (in Prague), creative writing workshops led by writers, interviews with "witnesses" of significant historic moments (in Prague), reading competitions in a library and creative workshops (in Rožňava) and translation seminars (in Rožňava). The transnational learning activities served as starting points for the creation of the main outputs of the project, which were as follows: an educational card game (300 pcs, e-version sent to more than 800 schools), educational cards focused on british literature, american literature and theory of literature, a new version of the game "book-hunting", an online quizz, literature escape room, a collection of fiction from creative writing workshops and their translation into English, audion stories from the testimonies of our witnesses, illustrations connected with the testimonies, a musical written, composed and performed by students, wall reading competitions and a puppet theatre created by our students. During the virtual activities our students were cooperating on the translation of the collection of stories, they were involved in an online competition - Escape room which was based on reading excerpts from different books. The participated in a book cover competition were they were provided with sewing sets and they created their own book cases. The participating students visited an online theatre performance with a follow - up discussion with the literary manager. The students had online discussions with writers and an illustrator and they created their outputs in cooperation. All the outputs were focused on student readership support, especially if the students are not that interested in reading. The outputs are suitable for use even outside of our organizations. The student selection process for the project was based mainly on the project objectives - our school included students from publishing and book sales branch, and graphic design branch (book illustration specialization). The Slovak high school partner included its bilingual branch because of the need of translation fiction into English. Others who also contributed to the project were: Czech writers (e.g. Ivana Myšková, Vratislav Kadlec, Tim Postovit, Sandra Vebrová Fialová, Jiří Kamen), ČT24 journalists, WW2 witnesses, former head of department at Oxford University Zuzana Říhová, artist Jan Macúch, the RoSa Centre in Prague and the Gemerská knižnica Pavla Dobšinského v Rožňave - library. During the educational activities, the students often worked in groups and enriched their key competencies. The team members had to correct each other's ideas, formulate their comments, rely on adequate arguments, and also had to make compromises and decisions during their joint work, reflect on their activities, etc. The work on the planned outputs included creativity (creation of questions, writing of artistic texts, artistic activity ...), culture (content of questions with the theme of literary Prague), cultural heritage (again creation of questions, artistic capture and passing on the experiences of witnesses). However, during the project, other outputs were added (especially on the initiative of a Slovak partner), which were closely related to creativity, culture and cultural heritage (musical staging, puppet shows, film production, prose dramatization and more). Thanks to the project, participants are enriched both in knowledge (literary Prague, Czechoslovak history, Czech and Slovak writers, etc.) and in the creative field (they have experience in writing artistic texts and their publications, realization of musicals, preparation of puppet shows, filming, dramatization of prose ...). They also gained inspiration for their future professional career. Their awarness of the cultural values was raised and they participated in the creation of these values (writing and reading stories from the collection Face to face, musical, puppet theater ...). Based on the latest educational activity, the knowledge of the English language was deepened, especially in the field of translation of the artistic texts. In addition to reading literacy, which is an integral part of a literary project, via creating the result of our project also the IT literacy was strenghetned (creating stories in Canva, creating a poster, etc.). Thanks to a meeting with journalists from ČT24, whose topic was misinformation, strengthening of media literacy was carried out as well.