The project « My root, my country, Our Europe » is a kindergarten project with 5 countries: France, Greece, Poland, Portugal and Bulgaria. This project is created to build a collaboration between family and school, to improve co-education and in working on cultural heritage all together. The main objective of this project is to open school’s doors to parents, to families, to create a confidence into school, in order to avoid school dropping in the comings years. All the families will be involved in this project included and especially disadvantaged social background family, immigrant’s family, refuges family or fragmented family. We want to involve the families in the project during this 2 years and even more because we think that the first step at school is very important for a child but also very important for his family and it will lay the foundation of his education. That means that at least 1100 pupils and their family will be involved in this project. Our activities will focus on discovering your own origins, our own country, being aware of our cultural heritage. Cultural heritage has a universal value. As our pupils are very young, parents would be very helpful. This project, through cherishing our cultural heritage, will be a good way to discover our diversity and to promote multiculturalism as an added value for the European of tomorrow. Activities throughout this project will explore with the help of parents: -Dance, music, costume (creation of a typical clothes for the mascot who is going to travel and logo for the project), -Food (creation of a European cookbook) -Literature (creation of a common European fairy tale game), -Art (creation of a numeric and traditional European book), -Natural history (creation a numeric and traditional European history book) As our pupils are very young, we want them to feel concerned about this project even when their teachers are traveling abroad; each school will have a Mascot who will travel during each meeting. This Mascot will “write” his “travel diary” and send it to school, so all the pupils will be able to follow the meeting. The objective is to share this experience with the pupils but also with their family and have the opportunity to exchange about it later on. In the same time, pupils will beginning a first English learning, all partners will built an “English Tool box” and will share easy activities with other teachers from the project and even more. In the project, “my roots, my country, Our Europe” pupils will communicate with their partners thanks to video-conferencing and to eTwinning platform. In the same time, teachers will also develop their professional skill in the area related to young learners during the 5 meetings in each partners’ school: problematic to be migrants parents and adapting his practises, fighting school dropout and promoting inclusion, art therapy to increase communication, use ICT tools to improve communication and learnings and at last, develop the “learning by doing” to strengthen the capacity of each pupil. We expect to improve parent’s involvement, and to raise the awareness about our rich cultural heritage and the preciousness of other cultural heritage. Our pupils are all different, have different backgrounds, and we expect that this project make them proud of what they are, and where they live, to build the Future European citizen. This project with 5 European kindergartens is innovating according to, with so young learners and their parents, is a challenge to consider the European education as a key to succeed and to integrate for everybody. Achieve an Erasmus+ project with kindergarten pupils is to meet the challenge of Education for those children and meet the challenge of integration for their family. “My roots, my country, Our Europe” is building the unity of tomorrow thanks to the diversity of today.
The project 'My roots, my country, our Europe' was developed and led by 5 schools (Portugal, Greece, Poland, Bulgaria and France). Project initially planned for 2 years and expanded to 3 years due to the pandemic to carry out this project as originally planned. The objective was to fight against school dropout by establishing throughout the 3 years a collaboration between families and the school and to share together our cultural wealth. We opened the school to those who came the least (allophone families, those with a painful school history, refugees, disadvantaged) so that families could discover the educational issue that takes place in the school from a very young age. Developing co-education projects have made it possible to strengthen the relationship of trust between parents/children so that the school issue is truly perceptible. We carried out 5 eTwinning projects where parents were invited to participate in the project by providing their know-how or their help to properly run the project in the classrooms. Approximately 1,100 families were involved in this project and our activities focused on discovering our origins, our country and our cultural heritage. We completed 5 eTwinning projects: - mascot+ : Traditional dances and costumes. Each school has made a traditional outfit for its mascot (democratically elected mascot by students and parents). The students learned and then taught a traditional dance of their country and a bookcreator of the dances of the 5 countries was realized. In addition, a project logo was also created by each school and elected by all school students. - European rest@urant: Our culinary richesness. We created a European cookbook and cooked the dishes of other partners. The students of the 5 schools also created a digital picture book of vegetables and a clip of a collaborative song (in English). - fairit@les Traditional storytelling. We made 2 board games: a “memory game” with the characters of tales) and a European fairytale box (a game to invent tales from images drawn at random) - @rts+ Our artistic wealth. Students worked with artists, musicians and monuments from the 5 countries. We have presented works and performances in our schools and created a European e- -European herb@rium + Our environmental wealth . We created a European herbarium with the plants, flowers and trees found around our schools and created a «Happy tree» collaborative clip with the 5 schools. In parallel with these 5 eTwinning projects conducted in our schools with our students, 5 training meetings were conducted in the 5 partner schools. Thus, teachers were able to develop their skills in different areas: - Pedagogical adaptation for the reception of families and migrant students (C1 France) - fight against dropping out of school and improve skills for the inclusion of all (C2 Portugal) - Innovative ICT tools to improve student learning (C3 Poland) - Art therapy for the student (C6 and C7 Bulgaria) - learning by project to develop students' skills (C8 Greece) During the 5 meetings, the mascots (5 identical rabbits in their traditional dress) “wrote” a travel diary to share their trips with the students. This way, our young students could discover the partner schools and follow the travel experience of our rabbits. During these 3 years, the students learned English and the teachers shared their “tools” on a blog to work more effectively with young children. English was the language of communication for videoconferences with other schools. Thanks to the 5 eTwinning projects, the students worked collaboratively with their European friends and the families followed the progress of the project . In each of our schools, the projects were also presented on the school blog. We noted an improvement in the involvement of families in school for this project but also for other activities in our schools. Collectively, this project has improved the school climate and reduced school/family conflict. Work habits have also been established for both teaching teams and families, and this will allow co-education to continue in schools. Through this Erasmus+ project, the cultural richness of our students has been shared and valued. This project also enabled students, families and teachers to be valued (press articles, awards, professional recognition) and enabled teachers involved in this project to develop their professional skills.