By establishing cooperation with the Alicante Training organization, we sought to deepen our students and teachers knowledge of the English and Spanish language, we tried to establish relationships with Spanish peers mediated by this organization and arrange teaching by other native speakers from a different environment which is not within our capabilities schools. By accommodating and integrating the children into Spanish families, we wanted to achieve the use of English / Spanish language in everyday practice, to get used to Spanish culture and customs, or to establish future cooperation. We also wanted to introduce our pupils and teachers to the Spanish concept of informatics and thus increase their digital skills competence, as our school was one of the first schools that implemented revised ICT teaching. In our lessons, we use iPads, develop programming and implement projects. So the goal was to introduce our students and teachers to both the Spanish environment, whether linguistic, cultural or digital, and the use of acquired knowledge in everyday life practice, so they are able to pass them on to their colleagues, classmates, parents and the wider school environment after the implementation of the trips schools.
When submitting the project application, we were a small village-character school and we were new to the program Erasmus+. We are a bilingual school, so we work with foreign languages as with the means of communication in the teaching process. Therefore, we are always happy if we manage to cooperate with a foreign school or organization for the purpose of verification/use of language skills. Although we have been teaching children by native speakers to mediate the daily use of foreign languages in practice, we have not been always successful, especially during the covid pandemic period, when freedom of movement was limited, and also the use of the Spanish language, because there are not such possibilities in Pardubice as, for example, in Prague. So the biggest motivation was to provide our pupils and teachers with a trip abroad so that they can improve their foreign languages and, last but not least, to contribute to the elimination of prejudices and fear of the unknown in our school and in its surroundings. Our school has been accepting Ukrainian refugees to study since the beginning of the war in Ukraine and that was possible to happen and continue even nowadays just thanks to Erasmus+ programme.