"""Building small actions into your day-to-day life can make a big difference to your levels of wellbeing. They will make you feel good and feeling good about yourself and others is a really important part of being healthy""Four schools in four different countries across Europe found each other in the same wish, to give their pupils a helping hand to wellbeing.To do so, a project with the same working title has been set up. They use the concept of enquiry beased learning to invite the pupils to be in charge of the change we like to achieve.They like to work beyond national curriculums and stimulate the pupil to ask questions, think critically and focus on finding solutions.De Noordwijkse school from The Netherlands, the Edinburgh Academy from Scotland, Colegio bilingue Torrente Ballester from Spain and J.V.Veski nim. Maarja Põhikool from Estonia have set up a programme of two years to get their pupils, teachers and parents involved into changing into healthier habits. The average age of the pupils travelling to pupilmeetings will be 10/11 years old. They will present their schools during the Erasmus meetings and will go back to schools with new experiences. Since this subject is valuable to many age groups, schools will involve all age groups as much as possible and wish to establish a link with the school improvement plan.The project ""A helping hand to wellbeing"" is set up in five different sub-projects which will be led by the different countries based on the expertise they have with this specific item.A first step towards wellbeing will be made with a sub-project called Mediterranean diet. It will bring insight into healthy meals, proportions of food, the importance of breakfast and the most important ingredient of the Mediterranean diet; olive oil. Schools will work on making healthy menus, experience the different European ways to have breakfast and learn about the language involved, Pupils will investigate all about the food pyramid and evaluate their own food consumption. The pupils meeting will be held at an educational farm and at the Spanish school.The Dutch school takes over with the sub-project Move your mood and will investigate the amount of minutes pupils move during the day and will use activity trackers to measure that. Different challenges in the classroom and on the playground will lead to more enthusiasm to move and will create a wide variety of tools for teachers and pupils.Maintaining the new healthy habits and taking them a step forward will be made by the Scottish sub-project on mental wellbeing. Emotions will play a crucial role. Pupils will learn how to recognise and how to classify them and will learn strategies that will work for them to stay in charge of a good mental health. All school will benefit from a greater practical emphasis and nurturing good mental health.Schools will stablish an ""Emotional first aid group"" who can monitor and promote initiatives across school about wellbeing.From looking after oneself we change toward looking after the environment with the Estonian project Think of Tomorrow. Investigating all about plants and forests, recycling and reducing pollution will be done in all schools. Pupils will work on ways to improve recycling, reducing rubbish and get accuinted with the ecological food sector. In Estonia the pupil meeting will invite the pupils to be create with rubbish and let them come up with new inventions to recycle. All students will also enjoy being in nature and get the chance to hike in the bog and visit a nature park with animals. To complete the project we will explore what it means to be part of the European Union. How does the European Union affects their daily lives and how their voice can be important in the future of Europe. This all will be linked to the previous aspects of the topic of wellbeing.To distribute the gained experience the four schools will work together on a digital and paper calendar with suggestions for other schools. It will present ideas on healthy food, exercises to do at school, tips to improve mental wellbeing and suggestions about recycling and reducing rubbish.During and after the project all school work with observation lists that are connected with their school pupil tracking system. Pupils will be asked to fill in feedback forms in their personal journals and reflect on their growth. An independent student from Inholland University of Applied Sciences, Haarlem, The Netherlands, is linked to the project to carry out independent research on the topic of wellbeing. Results will be used for her personal studies, as well as a Dutch national research about wellbeing. The results of the four schools will be used for the Erasmus+ project and can prove the change in the schools.This project will lead to a longterm change in our four schools and will hopefully be an inspiration to others."

The Caretaker project gives students the opportunity and insight to begin a process of taking care of oneself, others and the world around us. Our traditional teaching methods in schools have remained the same without hardly taking into account the rapid evolution of technology and means of communication over the past 20 years. This technological evolution has been so rapid that our youth today (referred to as Generation Z) have even been given a new label known as “iGens”. So it is crucial that these teaching methods are adapted in order to support the needs of the students. We live in a digital era where the means are there to make this a reality. iGens excel at multitasking and have an incredible knack for “thinking beyond the box”. What is lacking is “face-to-face” and “in person” contact because it is becoming the norm to communicate through devices and apps. We cannot continue imposing old methods but instead find a common ground, therefore we have devised this project which will combine the positive of the old and the positive of the new - a healthy balance between the two. Our objective is to devise a method for us as teachers, to provide our students with the opportunity to recognise that there are ways on how to cope with the stress and pressures that impact their daily lives and to give them a safe space to do so. To guide this process, our students will address themes under four main topics: Our Future, Mental Health, Sexual Awareness and Personal Development, which are topics that are relevant to their growth. By dealing with the topics through creative expression they will explore emotions, reduce anxiety, increase self-esteem and resolve other conflicts. Through integrating live-streaming the students can instantly connect with peers in other European countries who experience similar problems and together can overcome obstacles, find solutions and achieve personal insight by sharing and discussing their creative results. YouTube will be the chosen online platform to provide information from their live-stream discussions to a wider audience. There will be up to 20 students between the ages of 13 -16 years and some teachers involved from each of the four participating European schools. The students will come from very different social and cultural backgrounds with a wide range of abilities. The one thing they have in common is that they all have to cope with their future, their personal development, their sexual awareness and their mental health. A number of tasks and challenges dealing with the aforementioned themes will be delivered through creative and practical activities. Challenges will deal with the students active engagement with the community around them. The Tasks will deal with self-reflection and will incorporate various artistic forms of expression such as drawing, painting, story telling, performance, songwriting, singing and more. These activities will be carried out by the students either working alone, in pairs, creating role plays, group work or cross-country participation through live stream via the online video chat portal “Zoom”. The students will use a prepared ‘Booth’ - which can be a small room in the school, equipped with an iPad where tasks will be given and live-streams will be held. The iPad will also be used to record the majority of the activities within the tasks and challenges. Throughout the project the students from all four schools will combine their results together to create content for a YouTube channel. It will be a collaborative platform for the students to discuss live on a bi-monthly basis the different topics, tasks and/or challenges presented to them. It will be an open space for self-reflection, different points of view, respect, compassion, peer learning, teaching and understanding. It will be a secure informative platform open to the wider public and will enable our students to become responsible YouTube users, aka YouTubers. During the last meeting with all project participants in Berlin, an exhibition will be arranged to display and showcase the students artistic outcomes resulting from their creative tasks. Throughout the project the teachers will act as supervisors and give guidance to the students and not act as teachers in the common sense. They will give the students the space and opportunity to find out about themselves and their opinions on the given themes. All of these themes have moved into focus in recent times, be it fear and anxiety over climate change and the loss of nature, different attitudes to diversity or the political development in Europe and the world. We want to enable our students to have a good outlook on their future, overcome prejudices, deal with growing up and to share their emotions with peers. The work on this project will influence our students to be responsible, civil and intentional digital and social media users - to be caretakers.

"In this project we wanted to explore the world of paper - from Papyrus to Parchment to Stonepaper in history, arts and culture, economy and in terms of ecology to modern devices. But the work with this topic - which was fun and worked well for every participant - was not our only aim. We wanted to deepen the children’s understanding of the global implications by learning to ask critical questions and look behind the curtains of the topic. As we were a rather big group of 9 schools - from Primary to Secondary schools, and an associated school in Belarus, we needed a good structure where every school could find its place and work to its own conditions. We agreed on collecting our outcomes in the ""Five Pillars of Wisdom"" - history/arts, culture/ecology, recycling/economy and stonepaper/electronic future - with at least one contribution from each school in every pillar area. We also focussed on the pedagogical methods of Storyline and Understanding by Design - a planning tool to structure teaching and learning. Some of the schools already knew about this and had practiced it for some years, but others were new to the methods and curious to learn. With various projects, each school could add to the collection in the 5 pillars. Each school practiced Storyline as a tool for teaching a foreign language and gave an example of Understanding by Design. The practical Art work was always a focus in our workshops in Italy, Spain, Turkey, Germany and Estonia. We were also able to gain some public attention through various National Newspapers. The main outcomes were: - As a start all schools were engaged in the initiative „Boat for Hope“ by folding paper boats and exhibit them publicly to the school community to become aware of the migrants and their fates- Inviting experts to school for art work with paper. For example: Workshop in Italy - exhibition of work in a gallery, Mask making and Commedia dell Arte in Germany, working on the national painters with paper costumes in Holland, learning about the art to make parchment in Turkey, theatre plays and audio plays about paper in nearly all partnerschools.- Showing the outcomes of the questions behind in public demonstrations (workshop in Germany: ICAN and the origami cranes) / Europe Day in Berlin) with support of all partners.- All schools wrote articles about their completed work and published it in a professionally edited Erasmus+ Newspaper, printed in Italy.- All schools explored the economy behind paper - using stonepaper, setting up paper shops to sell recycled paper items in their schools, selling handmade items to customers at Christmas and school markets,- Visiting museums, papermills, paper recycling centres and other places to experience the making of paper and the history behind it.- learning about the Braille writing in some workshops with all partners- Teaching Storyline to learn a foreign language with the paper topic (time machine, going back in time and learn about paper, reading the same books in all schools) Our main products - the publication of the Erasmus+ Newspaper, the films about the plays and all other outcomes are shown on our website: pop.mediafactum.net. They have been distributed to teachers and parents, officials, newspapers and National Agencies and had an enormous impact on the community. The project has gained huge interest for the Erasmus Project in general and for the future in our schools. Especially the participating children gained more self - confidence, knowledge and the ability to ask deeper questions. They experienced various ways to learn as a team and organise their learning independently, as well as exploring their use of electronic devices by asking questions about the future of books and paper. Parents and teachers were also involved in these questions and looked at their own use of books and mobile phones. We hope that the skills developed to ask questions, gather information and make decisions independently will continue to grow during their school years and beyond. Meeting the pupils and teachers of the partnerschools had an enormous impact on all the students, parents and teachers in our schools. It strengthened the European idea and the knowledge about Europe. Most of them felt that Europe is a stable part of their lives (see evaluation)."

This project, Back to OUR Future, aims to encourage pupils, staff and whole school communities to explore how we are currently living our lives within the context of the economical challenges that we currently face. It is generally perceived that money is hard earned and that basic life essentials, eg. food and petrol are all very expensive. Similarly on the environmental side, there are global worries about nature, climate change, trade, globalism and agricultural methods which are constantly reported in the news. Traditional knowledge of making things, growing our own food, land use and agricultural methods are being rapidly lost, even in rural areas where they have been a part of the way of life for centuries.In this project we hope to engage our school communities in a real and important exploration of how we are living today. We want to raise awareness of how our rush to progress and improve has actually lost us many of the basic skills necessary for day to day living and general ‘life maintenance’. We aim in this project to re-skill our pupils and educate our school communities with many of the essential life skills and values that we have lost like making things with our hands, entertaining ourselves with games, dance and songs, grow food and know, where it comes from, improve the land,have small businesses, which care for the environment, recycling, and zero emmissions and care for the community.. Our key objectives involve developing:1. enterprise in both individuals and school communities2. a connection between the cause and effect of global issues3. healthy, active lifestyles to support general health and wellbeing4. a 'can do' approach to making things happen in our lives and communities5. inclusion for students of all ability levels6. exciting 'bigger learning' experiences with real outcomes involving the work of individuals and communities7. a sense of our past heritage and of the skills of those who went before us8. the learning of a foreign language with a real connection to the country of origin9. the linking of confidence, real skills, enterprise and connection to European Citizenship and cultural diversity10. innovative, creative teaching and learning experiences with a focus on staff professional development and pupil choice11. the use of ICT to link and connect European school communities12. motivation, improved competences and confidence in all of our school community stakeholdersThe project is designed to continue the excellent and exciting work of an already established group of ten partner schools (plus one associate partner – Belarus). The partnership formed under the Comenius programme and has established a supportive group of stakeholders with different cultural and religions backgrounds who value the work, aims and vision of the group as a whole. There is a strong European Citizenship dimension to our group ‘thinking’ and whilst the partners all have their own curriculums to deliver we have enjoyed celebrating and exploring our diversity. The challenges faced across the profile of the school group include urban and city challenges and remote rural isolation issues.The schools range from small two teacher rural schools to large multi-stage city schools.The project includes up to 80 teachers / staff and about 500 pupils.Each school will make a plan for term one in partnership with pupils to take forward the four main skill areas: Making Things (Making toys, gifts, food, clothes, seasonal produce, art from natural finds, etc 2. Growing things linked to Global Eco Work (Gardening, nature work and connecting with nature, local and global issues. Connecting with seasons and seasonal activities.)3. Entertaining Ourselves (Rediscovering traditional games, songs, dances and hobbies, learning the Greek Alphabet.)4. Saving and Trading (Bank of Comenius, trading, saving and a reward / value system, Blue Economy )The above plan will be repeated each term with the skill level increasing and connecting with the activities taking place around the project theme and will be referred to as The Four Skills Plan.The 7 workshops will give the students the opportunity to exchange their knowledge, work on the topics and grow together into a European community.