We had five main objectives for our project. First, to establish and promote international relations and cooperations between our schools in Finland and Croatia. Secondly, we wanted to give our students an opportunity to make foreign friends and to get to know foreign cultures and their history, nature and educational systems, to name but a few. Thirdly, we wanted to enhance the language skills of both teachers and students, and give them a true authentic opportunity to speak English. We wanted this to boost everyone's confidence in speaking a foreign language and also to become more open-minded and interested in foreign cultures.Fourthly, we wanted to enhance the sense of community and active participation within our schools and between our schools. Working together is beneficial to everyone's well-being and that brings us closer together and gives that sense of belonging to a community. Our fifth objective for the project was to find means for enhancing the well-being and general motivation of all the students and teachers, and to find new good practices for this. We also wanted to find out more about the scientific research on the topic of well-being.
Neither school had had previous experience of an Erasmus+ project, and our Finnish school had a Comenius project some twenty years ago, so we felt it was time to apply for a project together to get funding from the European Union for a common project. We wanted to establish international cooperation, and especially after the Covid19 pandemic, we wanted to be more open to the world and human face to face contact and new experiences again. Kurikka is a rural area with a lot of low-income families who can't afford to travel much, so we wanted to give this opportunity for all the students to apply, not only those who can afford to travel at their own expense. Kurikka had participated a year earlier in an EU project for town, and that is how we had found our Croatian partner. Two teachers from the Finnish school had just participated also in a course for teachers funded by the EU, and that is how we came up with the topic of well-being for this project. Students seemed very stressed out over exams and the huge competition when applying to universities, and the social media brought its own challenges and stress for young people. Teachers were also stressed out because of their huge workload and the many changes at their work.