Several scientific researches have proven that sports activities have many beneficial effects on children with special needs, including better overall fitness, improved cognitive benefits, better control of weigh, healthier bone density, better emotional and psychological health, improved social and motor skills, etc. Sport is also one of the most important tools for the equal integration of children with special needs into society and helps society to accept people with special needs as an active part of the society and help overcome prejudices. Although there have been some improvement in inclusion of special need children into sports activities, researches still show that the progress and literature in this area are still progressing too slowly and children with special needs are still left out in sports despite the great advantages they could gain. The main objective of our project is to develop a guideline and application for our target groups, containing concrete ideas, recommendation and examples of suitable sports activities for children with special needs and to improve the skills of the target groups in the field of integrating special need children into sports activities. The participant in the project will be teachers, PE teachers, counsellors and accompanying persons, working in regular and special need schools, trainers and coaches in sports organizations, parents of special need children and the final target group will be the special need children who will benefit from the project. Since the project will involve testing of the developed material, we will use the methods of experimenting. During the project, the partners will use the method of problem solving to resolve potential issues. The participants, directly involved in the project, will transfer their knowledge to other staff members and methods of demonstration. The participants will collect feedbacks and results of the project activities, which will be discussed at internal and international project meetings with the method. Expected impacts are: -new knowledge and skills of target groups for integrating children with special needs into sports activities -development of new tools (the guideline and the Android application) for integrating children with special needs into sports activities -bigger connection among schools with special need children and various sports organizations/clubs in the area -better understanding of beneficial effects of sports on children with special needs among teachers and sports trainers/coaches -bigger number of hours involving sports during extra curriculum activities at participating schools -increased number of special need students enrolled into various sports organizations/clubs -reduced fear of parents regarding involvement of their special need children into sports activities -improvement of language competences of the participants through the oral communication during transnational meetings, Skype conferences, writing e-mails, reports and similar -bigger awareness of local school authorities and association for special need education about the importance of involving special need children -a better understanding of social, language and cultural diversities and reactions to them after the participants take part in transnational meetings and the training where they will experience different cultures, educational systems, food, way of living and similar -greater understanding of different educational systems in Europe, especially in the field of special need education -greater understanding of situation and state of sports in connection to special need children in participating countries -transfer of examples of good practices, seen at the transnational meeting, trainings or heard at the transnational meetings, to other participating organizations -since there are some newcomers in Erasmus plus projects involved in the project, this project will enable them to get a more positive attitude towards European projects and values of the EU and will probably motivate the participants and participating organizations towards a more active involvement in other European projects and cooperation in the future - increased understanding and recognition of informal, especially those in the field of sports activities for a better performance in the field of formal education - general improved well-being of special need students - better overall fitness, improved cognitive benefits, better control of weigh, healthier bone density, better emotional and psychological health, improved social skills and motor skills, improved self-esteem, reduced risk for diseases such as diabetes with special need children at participating organizations
The initiation of the NeedSport project was based to our findings that several scientific researchers have proven that sports activities have many beneficial effects on children with special needs. Sport is also one of the most important tools for the equal integration of children with special needs into society and helps society to accept people with special needs as an active part of the society and help overcome prejudices. Although there have been some improvement in inclusion of special need children into sports activities, researches still show that the progress and literature in this area are still progressing too slowly and children with special needs are still left out in sports despite the great advantages they could gain. The main objective of our project was to develop a guideline and application for teachers, trainers, coaches, parents that work or are in connection to children with special needs containing concrete ideas, recommendation and examples of suitable sports activities for children with special needs and to improve the skills of the target groups in the field of integrating special need children into sports activities. The participant in the project were teachers, PE teachers, counsellors and accompanying persons, working in regular and special need schools, trainers and coaches in sports organizations, parents of special need children and the final target group were the special need children. Over 60 teachers/trainers/coaches were directly involved in the project, whether in form of participation in international activities (meetings, training), local activities, writing or testing exercise, creating videos, taking part in internal trainings, and even a higher number of the target groups was involved in the project indirectly through dissemination activities of project partners. The project included development and testing of sport exercise adapted in accordance to specific special needs of children and various sport categories. These exercise were added to the final guideline developed in the project, which is divided into two parts: a theoretical one where the benefits of sports on children with special needs and its benefits considering inclusion of special need children are described, and a more practical part with the exercise developed in the project and adapted to achieve a bigger inclusion of special need children into sport activities are described. At the same time the content of the developed exercise was placed into an Android application, also developed in the project, where users can instantly find suggestions for exercise adapted according to the special needs of children and according to sport category. Apart from testing the developed exercise during the project, the participating organizations were also testing the developed Android application. The project also included three transnational meetings in person, while the blast meeting and the training were carried out online due to different restrictions and regulations in the participating countries and organizations. Also due to Covid situation the partners decided to do extra work on intellectual outputs and therefore developed videos where all the developed exercises are demonstrated and can therefore be used online at any time and any interested party and can be used as an online tool by teachers, coaches, and parents, which showed to be very useful during the periods when schools and sport centres were shut down and will be a very useful online tool for a future use. The project also involved the development of evaluation/assessment forms for teachers, trainers, parents and teachers so that the developed material was evaluated throughout the project to achieve development of the material of the highest quality. The project not only produced a useful guide and Android application for teachers, trainers, coaches parents on how to adapt sport activities according to special needs of children and to ensure a higher inclusion of special need children into sport activities, which will be available for free to general public in the future, but also ensured a very high number of extra sport lessons and activities for special need children from participating organizations and created stronger links among participating schools with local sports organizations and the other way around and cooperation that will last long after the project is finished. With the help of the project there is now a higher number of sport trainers and coaches that are no longer to include special need children into their sport activities and at the same time parents of special need children have less doubts about their children participating in various sport activities.