By implementing the project Careful Kids, the main goals we wanted to achieve were as follows: 1. To address the shortcomings in education and qualification observed among our teachers by providing them with the opportunity to gain craft knowledge, skills and experience in order to improve the children's attention and motivation in preschool education through mindfulness, Intelligence Games, Orienteering, Rhythm activities, and 2. To increase the capacity of all the partner organizations by transferring knowledge on these issues to our students and institutions. More specifically, our goals were also: 1. To be able to integrate activities about attention and motivation into our school subject contents, 2. To produce a guide material for Attention and Motivation activities for preschool education, and 3. To increase our rate of attention-motivation activities in our schools from 15% to 30%, as aimed per our strategic plans.
We applied for the project since the teachers in each of the partner organizations had noticed that technology was starting to dominate the physical and mental development of our students and resulting in maladaptive behaviors such as hyperactivity and distraction, further confirmed through observations of the counseling teams at each institution (psychologist/pedagogist). The situation was only exacerbated due to the fact that our teachers were not sufficiently educated or qualified to address this issue by applying activities that could increase the level of motivation and attention among children in kindergarten and preschool (4-6 yo). The internally distributed surveys among our partners' employees confirmed what was already observed and discussed; the survey results demonstrated that an overwhelming 90% of the respondents felt inadequately trained for attention and motivation developing activities in formation education. The project Careful Kids was designed to specifically address this need in a systematic and structured way and add a transnational dimension to it in the sense that both teachers and organizations could share their best practices and learn from each other in order to improve the children's well-being.