“Euro-environments: rural areas as a learning opportunity” has been carried out by four schools that shared common contexts, objectives, necessities, and educational approaches; these schools are all set in rural environments that have been badly affected by a demographic decline and ageing population. This social situation shapes their students´ personal development as well as their expectations, let alone the upcoming opportunities that might arise in their birthplaces.Our school “Pablo Díez” has been fighting for many years to address these deficiencies, and with this goal in mind, a methodological proposal using Project Based Learning (PBL) has been a cornerstone within our school training plan. We soon realized that this further study on our environment should entail a European dimension and platform where the objectives and the competences are to be embodied; by doing so, students are likely to be better equipped with the right tools to successfully operate in a global work environment.Through the E-twinning community, we contacted The Collége La Feuillade (Vic-sur-Aisne, France), “IIS G.A.Pishcedda (Bosa, Italy) and Szkola Podstawowa nr10im. Janusza Korczaka (Tarnobrezg, Poland); all of them were schools eager to make a cross border educational partnership which brought the strengths of the rural areas to life and turned our schools into an instrument of sustainable and cultural development.Along with the aforementioned objectives, the project tasks were targeted mainly to boost high quality skills. We challenged ourselves to promote the sense of initiative, the creativity, and the entrepreneurial spirit of our students. We also set our hearts on building up collective awareness standards. The project promoted inclusion and tolerance among our youngsters; it also prepared them to become active actors in their self-development much less upgraded their competences, notably the cultural and awareness expression, the digital and the linguistic one.Six teachers from the partner countries along with fifteen teachers working in the coordination school attended a workshop on robotics application in school orchard management at the early stages of the project. During this seminar, teachers learnt how to manage Arduino software in order to set sensors in motion; these sensors monitor the exact water quantity a plant should need; working in this way, the intelligent use of this invaluable resource is indisputable. Needless to say that this cutting-edged technology has the biggest impact on farming, main sector in our economy. 62 students and 16 teachers attended three mobilities with students organized within the project implementation. The polish school shared entrepreneur women stories who had to overcome an array of obstacles to succeed when setting up their businesses. They also showed the rest of the participants valuable examples of creative adaptations of recreation areas. In France, all the participants worked in the school orchard making a worm compost bin and an insect hotel. The focus of the mobility in Bosa revolved around tourism and sustainable development. Unfortunately, and to the despair of the four schools, the last two mobilities scheduled within the project could not be accomplished owing to the Covid-19 pandemic. Instead, further efforts were needed to do domestic activities that let us work in tandem sharing the results and impact with the partner schools. The coordinator school displayed its partners the project-based activities that had been accomplished along these 36 months so that they were externally assessed as formerly agreed in the objectives. The research on the environment was rounded up with the creation of a moving literary route entitled “The echo of the mountain” based on two literary works by Julio Llamazares. This literary route has enriched the area of Boñar, and it has also promoted high-quality competences and entrepreneurship. By the same token, the heart-warming route has ramped up the area´s international visibility turning Euroenvironments into the driving force of cultural development. The sustainability of the project is clearly demonstrated through this route whose dissemination on social media, newspapers, and radio exceeded initial expectations.The four schools did roughly 40 different activities over the course of the project, each of them with clear goals in mind: interdisciplinary approach to the surrounding environments, cultural exchanges, schools’ internationalization, and social skills increase.During these three hectic years, we have had a thorough understanding of our areas, discovered our heritage, designed a literary tour, attended workshops, analysed strengths and opportunities but above all this, we have led to the conclusion that these rural environments do offer significant opportunities ahead. Furthermore, we are all convinced that there are real opportunities for our students to make their living in their rural birthplaces.

ESCEI (European Scholar Congress on Environmental Issues) is a Project created to exchange good environmental practices among different countries, giving consciusness about this global issues (it is not a local problem but a global one) and making students primary actors about the transformations our schools need to be better bioclimatic work spaces throughout their improvement proposals. The target students will be aged from 12 to 14 years old and during the 24 months of the Project will developed different activities for:1. Having Students Experts Trained at different kind of pollutions trhoughout 5 mobilities:a. Noise Pollution workshopb. Air Pollution workshop.c. Water and Soil Pollutiond. Waste management and Recyclinge. Light Pollution2. Peer Learning: these experts will come back to their schools teaching the rest of their mates and doing eco-auditories to partner's schools to detect possible environmental improvement actions.3. Preparation and participation as lecturers of a big act to share the results and the solutions proposed from their reasearch: The European Scholar Congress on Environmental Congress, because environment is our home and it is responsibility of each one of us taking care and doing actions to contribute to its conservation. « Alone we can do so little. Together we can do so much. » -Helen Keller

Our goal is improving the efficiency of comprehensive teaching and raising the awareness that cultural and aesthetic values play an important role in our everyday lives. These didactic aims will be completed in the standard lessons but also on extra curricular activities using the techniques and strategies from the theatrical methodology. The schools participating in the project will be lively places of artistic work, education and teaching. Students will strengthen the key skills, actively improving their abilities to think creatively and learn through different activities: literary, acting, musical, declamatory, artistic, dancing, computational and social. Teachers will help students to build complex vision of surrounding world by interfering in contents of these fields. Native languages teachers, art, music, history, IT and English teachers but also school councellors will cooperate. They will be also responsible for spreading didactic-theatrical methods in their home schools by adequately and effectively incorporating them in the lessons. Systematic exchange of experience, didactic materials, proposals and results between the partner schools teachers will help to introduce new, interesting solutions. It will be possible thanks to regular communication via available internet tools but also face to face conversations as two short staff meetings are planned. The project requires of each of the schools building a net of local relationships. In the work on implementation of the project teachers will have allies in parents, local governments, education authorities, scientific and cultural institutions in the private and public sector (local culture houses, museums, galeries, libraries, radio and television and private people). All the planned activities, both in school but also those on international level will make the students more interested in the surrounding world, more prone to start individual quest, able to critical analysis. Short term students exchanges will encourage the students to constant improving their language skills, make friends, learn to cooperate in international task groups. During the activities students will be engaged in many interesting actions, for example: creating stage space, writing theatrical scripts and put on school plays based on motifs from national classic for the audience and recording a radio play. These activities will give students lots of joy, make them more self confident and realise that they have a lot to offer to other people. Detailed documentation of the conducted activities will be available through created links on the partner schools internet websides to all interested in it. Teachers hope that these two year work in the project will positevely influence the school educational offer, will help further developement of school and considering students – it will prepare them well to future life in constantly changing world requiring of the individual the ability to all life learning and adjusting to new conditions.

The project title `more future, less plastic` is not only a catchy title, it should also serve as a guiding principle for the project. It is the core aim of this adventure based on our deep conviction that the project`s activities will help students to reach out awareness about plastic pollution and developing activism to change something for their own future.The method of project-based learning is the framework for the project in which students will work on the big topic of climate change and concentrate on plastic pollution. They will learn about the 3R`s, be active in workshops like recycling and cleaning actions and will inform themselves about biodiversity and water pollution. All these processes will be documented and saved in a project- kid. Therefore, the students will be able to experience new practices and to preserve them for fellow or future students. In doing so, the learners will be responsible for their own learning process and become independent and creative subjects.The main core of the project is to integrate students from five schools as to work and produces proper outcomes of their work. Students are firstly invited to get to know each other better in search of their cultural and personal identity, and are then progressively guided to open themselves to the richness of diversity, looking into and through different cultures, and looking for building new, creative ways of communicating, sharing, learning and growing together. Five partner schools are participating in the project:Germany, Poland, Spain, Cyprus and The Netherlands encourage the students to participate in several activities in many various ways and come together to exchange and share experiences and best practices in these two fields and find innovative ways to work with students as to gather their attention and curiosity. One of our aims is also developing awareness for the environment by offering interesting and innovative tasks.While creating the project partner schools discussed and shared their experience in thefield of climate awareness, plastic avoiding and in the field of innovative methods and agreed on brainstorming the following topics and actions.The Netherlands will deal with the topic of plastic pollution in water.Poland will face on the topic of the 3R´s and giving things a second life.Cyprus will deal with the topic of sustainable consumption and biodiversity.Spain will search for answers to the question if plastic free is possible.Germany will organize some actions to clean the environment and to follow the way of our trash. We do not want to provide the students with solutions, but want them to develop their own solutions by making them aware of the pollution, which we want to disseminate at an European and International level by developing a project kid.Most of the activities proposed will be maintained also after the end of the project. They can be successfully transferred to different actions and events at all of the partner schools and incorporated into schools curricula. Accordingly, we hope to anchor our approach in our school contexts most and foremost.

The innovative aspect of this project is that cultural and language learning, will emerge not only from visiting foreign cultures first hand but also via interaction with the local elderly persons who will relate their untold tales of the past bringing out the tradition and culture of their land. The students will translate the oral into text. Activities will include visits to elderly care homes or elderly people are invited to the school where they are asked to tell stories from the past. These stories will be documented and the language teacher will modify to make them interesting for children. The art teacher will make illustrations to accompany the stories. Throughout the project 10 stories from each country will be collected where text will be accompanied with questions which can be used to test language understanding. The stories from all the 6 countries will be collected in a book. During the activities children from the different countries will be split into groups and the children will practice story telling. The children will narrate the stories to the other children so all the children hear different stories from different countries. The elderly people who help will feel acknowledged for their contribution. This project will involve 6 schools from different EU countries and will consist of 3 transnational meetings each involving 2 teachers from each country. Activities involving 5 students and 2 teachers from every country will be held in 4 hosting countries. Activities will consist of educational tours that have the objective of enhancing the cultural and language development of the participants. At the transnational meetings there will be a storytelling course, so teachers can combine and consolidate the work carried out during the project so that the final meeting will consist of a conference that will launch the book produced by the participating members of this project. In the process of conducting their activities, as a result of the visits to gather stories, our children will have had the opportunity to spend time with elderly people who are sometimes very lonely therefore another beneficial effect is generated. The elderly people will be willing to share with us about the past whereby this will be for them a valuable experience because they will feel valued and useful. Apart from offering the companionship, our children will be giving the indication to the elderly persons how cherished and treasured their input will be in that it will be taking the form of a document that will be disseminated throughout the EU and that furthermore it will be a contribution to the European cultural heritage. From their end, the children will be enriched with a first hand learning experience that will enrich them not only from the academic point of view as the oral is translated into text, but this will enhance the childrens' values and sense of belonging. Through storytelling this project purports to describe the social and cultural activity on an EU level by sharing stories. Every culture has its own stories or narratives, which may be consequently shared as a means of education, cultural preservation or instilling moral values. By means of this project we will not only create more cultural awareness but will produce teaching/learning material that will be utilized by students EU wide. The resulting output in the form of a published and an ebook, is intended to provide for a tool for the improvement of cultural and language development, both for the participating members and equally the other students who will be sharing the wealth of information produced. This project will ultimately also benefit migrants in that they will be provided with the means to understand better the history of the city they are living in and this should help them integrate better. As a final task, the comparative perspective will be brought out between the participating countries so that the stories are used as a basis to discover tradition and culture with a view to bringing out a common European element. Following this unique experience the schools will have built and gained newer concepts so they can not only share and disseminate the new ideas but also open up for more diverse situations as those encountered on a EU level rather than the more restricted national level. The schools will gain the ability to guide future learners with the required information on the practices and culture of other countries. On a national level, this experience will allow the schools to interact more positively with an ever growing diverse learner base. On a European level, these schools would be more equipped in their EU-wide prospects due to their experience in other EU member states, other than their mother country. In addition, this experience will diffuse potentially new learning practices based on integration via the cultural and language enrichment. This would, undoubtedly, encourage and increase mobility within the EU.