Small Scientists Across Europe is a project combining kindergarten education programmes, reflections on the implementation of these programmes and innovative methods for acquiring scientific knowledge in order to develop thinking in a structured way. This project brought together seven European schools of preschool level from six different countries, including a school specialising in the education of pupils with disabilities, linking more than 75 teachers, 1000 pupils and their families.It allowed students to broaden their scientific knowledge on four main themes: Earth, Air, Water and Fire and to be confronted with problem situations in order to acquire the skills necessary to understand phenomena through an investigative approach.By allowing children to appropriate a motivating starting question (simple but making sense so that children appropriate the problem and want to solve it), this approach allows them to experiment themselves with simple and available equipment, to confront others in action, to observe what they are looking for, to discuss with their peers, to bring out solutions and to share discoveries. This approach allows for in-depth and not superficial learning through the understanding of the real-world phenomena to which they have been exposed and the active construction of knowledge. This project also made it possible to develop language in all its dimensions and communication.Each theme to be studied was divided into several experiments taking into account the material, effects and possible transformations. The young child in each structure was confronted not only with experiments conducted in his or her environment, but also those carried out by the partners (twenty-one different experiments on each theme, three in each school and of three difficulty levels). The experience of the partner countries allows the confrontation of events, structures and thinking that are different from those of the country of origin. Experiences are documented in manuals for children to create personalized materials, including real and functional experiences.In addition to the production of four scientific books (one on each theme) for students, teachers and academic inspection (to ensure wider dissemination), students produced literary works (twenty eight stories on the four different themes) and played online activities based on their own drawings or productions. Thanks to the scientific context integrated into the children's daily environment and the selected activities that are an integral part of the national education programmes, our children's skills in research, critical thinking and creativity have been developed. They experimented with different materials, learned through play, cooperation and collaboration with other children, respecting rules and responsibilities, had the opportunity to explore, observe, analyse and solve problems, feel the joy of creativity.Our project has strengthened the digital and technical key competences of staff and children, as well as the key competences in cultural and intercultural awareness. Teachers in partner pre-schools are now more confident and more willing to adopt and use new technologies in their classrooms. A dedicated project website is a living and regularly updated source of information that will continue after the two years of the project (part of the budget has been set aside to maintain the site). Throughout the project's life cycle, the documents have been registered in Twinspace on the eTwinning platform, all teachers have registered and been able to discover the platform and get involved in projects.All planned project meetings were successfully implemented and took place in a fruitful and productive atmosphere. At these meetings, objectives, targets and activities were clearly defined. An agreed timetable clarified all objectives and set specific deadlines, and these meetings were an excellent opportunity to exchange good practices in science education. Communication between participating educational staff strengthened networks and provided feedback on ideas that could be used in the project.The evaluations put in place show a real interest on the part of children and teachers in this type of discovery, the practice of experiments in class and the desire to ensure that this teaching continues in future years. The parents of the students appreciated this different approach, the team's investment in this project, its success and the communication around it.

Education for a multicultural world in an environment, that is changing very fast, has to be set already at pre-school level. Language knowledge and training on this level is essential for preparing a small child and consequential its family for a multicultural society. Development of social skills, collaboration, communication, tolerance towards others, critical thinking in an early stage are fundamentals for building a future society, where the children can be fully integrated. This is the reason for the established partnership among four countries on the grounds of analysing, identifying and sharing the same issues and challenges. Open curricula and work fields enabled a strong framework and broad variety for our cooperation. We created a partnership, which included more than 1000 children from our organizations, teachers, parents, and fellow colleagues, representatives of different associations on local, regional, (inter)national level, municipalities and professional institutions. We involved actively not only our whole organizations, but also parents and professionals from higher educational institutions. Furthermore, we entered the ground of scientific approach to teaching and learning in kindergartens with following activities:- improving English language knowledge for the staff, using new methods of early childhood language learning, thus to increase the number of English learning lessons for children, - learning about volcanoes and creating experiments, - sharing national fictional and non-fictional stories and the characters and heroes from those stories,- exchanging and planting seeds, - writing English letters and word in the snow, - sleeping over in the kindergartens and learning about our night skies, - reading literature with parents in form of a English backpack, - exchanging games, gifts, learning each other’s’ dances and songs and collaborate in English speaking ones, - collaborating online, playing quizzes and puzzles, competing in video conferencing online tools,- using tablets, apps, robotics and coding for English training, - learning about the environmental issues and how to take care of our local and wider environment, which were quite on a high level for pre-primary schools.With such activities, we reached the set objectives:- improvement of English language knowledge at children and professionals in kindergartens,- improvement of social skills and competences of children and increasing the social inclusion of children, - improvement and increase of quality and professional skills (new methods of teaching foreign language and of teaching in general, digital skills and social skills) of kindergarten teachers, - raising the awareness about other countries and the European area and consequently the tolerance and understanding among different families and people,- promoting and stimulating of multiculturalism by exposure to foreign language learning. We think that we reached the set objectives and even exceeded them by following activities, impacts and results: significant improvement of quality and number of English related lessons, a lot of them with ICT aid, obtained awareness about the fact that we live in a multicultural society already on pre-primary level, huge impact on local, regional, national and international level (among them fellow professional institutions, secondary and higher education institutions, associations, NGOs, local municipalities), presentations and participation at local, regional, national and international seminars and conferences, visibility in online news platform, classic newspapers, social media, national radio and a large and rich database on Twinspace. Concrete results are our eBook, collection of papers, a successful international conference in Slovenia with external eminent professionals, the database on Twinspace with videos, sheets, songs, drawings, presentations, games, movement related activities, stories from all countries, IT related activities (Kahoot quizzes, Padlets, online puzzles, robotics lessons, QR codes, etc.). The long-term benefits of our project will be not only one model, but more proposed models for early childhood foreign language learning, which we already connected to STEM area, since in this area we witness a big lack. We enriched our limited resources with not only this models and approaches, but also with English language learning on a daily basis. This has long-term impact on children, the staff, parents and the local environment and provides good practice examples for the regional, national and international level. English is now present in the everyday life and lessons of all organizations and will be part in the future. Thus, this has and will have sustainable effect on children’s social skills, multicultural understanding, empathy skills and the ability to learn foreign language, but due to interdisciplinary approach it will have such effect also on other subject and fields in their lives.

The settling-in period (adaptation phase) is one of the most important phase in the preschool education (0/6 years), and has an important impact on the quality of the preschool life of the children, and even on the future school life. It’s a big step not only for the children but also for their parents and family, childhood services are useful both for the children and the development of their personality, and for the parents and the improvement of their parental skills. It’s important for all families, but especially for the most vulnerable ones, such as migrants, belonging ethnic minorities as Roma, with an economic or cultural poverty situation, risk of social exclusion etc. The aim of FIRST STEPS project is to identify and share European good practices on this important adaptation phase in pre-schools; to analyze and compare the important activity of socio-behavioral adaptation of the child in childcare services; collect data about the local/regional/national context of partner countries; give the opportunity to the ECEC professional to discuss on project topic, share their experiences, to expand professional knowledge and skills. To achieve these goals will be used several methodologies, such as presentations; professional discussion; direct testimony of parents, teachers and other subjects involved in the first adaptation period; workshop; job shadowing; observation and visit to the preschools. One innovative methodology is the realization of a VIDEO for “STREAMIMG JOB SHADOWING and OBSERVATION”: each partner will realize, during the adaptation period, share and discussed it during the 5 training. FIRST STEPS project is part of the overall Early Childhood Education and Care Research and Quality Development activity, developed at European level by Galileo and its partners, engaged in various previous and actual European projects. In the project are involved 6 organizations from 5 EU countries:-Montessori IQ Corner (Bosnia&Herzegovina), private pre-school institution-ARCA Cooperativa Sociale (Tuscany, Italy), social enterprise that manages several early childhood services -GEDI (Catalonia, Spain), that manages 6 municipal-owned ECEC centers-Jozsefvarosi Egyesitett Bolcsodek (Hungary), that is managing the nurseries of the VIII district of Budapest-Preschool Põngerjas (Estonia), educational institution on the Russian boarder providing a bilingual education.-Galileo Progetti (Hungary), project coordinator, non-profit enterprise promoting social inclusion policies, education quality development, social economy and social field sector in general and European Networking and cooperation.In addition to presenting the methodologies adopted in the settling-in period, each organization shares with partners its experiences with specific target groups: -Roma ethnic minority in Hungary-Inclusive education of children with disabilities in Italy-Migrants background in Spain -Bilingualism and boarder specificities in Estonia-Montessori method in Bosnia&HerzegovinaIn order to achieve these objectives, during the FIRST STEPS Project will be implemented 2 Transnational Project Meeting and Short-term Joint Staff Training (1 in each country), involving around 100 international participants, mostly educators, teachers and managers of Early Childhood Education and Care services, and local stakeholders, decision makers, municipalities, higher education institutions, in addition to the staff of the host organization.Through the mobility events and the dissemination activities, the project will reach about 800 direct and indirect beneficiaries.As final results of the project, the training materials and outputs will be summarized in a Final Collection, in English, an interactive virtual document freely available and shared with stakeholders and all interested people.

Nowadays,the rapidly growing of ICT, shapes a new operation framework of the nursery school that requires a quality education and development of participatory teaching methods, having as a goal children’s all sides development and their smooth socialization, in order to be ready to face the “information and knowledge society”,where they are going to live in.It is thus crucial to give children all the required skills and abilities that will prepare the European citizens of tomorrow society starting from kindergartens, as the first stage of systematic education. Τhe new technologies are able to become a valuable tool for expressing, communicating, exploring, experimenting and searching in the hands of pre school education pupils ,because contribute to the enhancement of exploratory learning of many different cognitive subjects and sciences ,facilitates their deeper comprehension ,enhances to the development of analytical and synthetic thinking and helps children development and their smooth socialization.By using cooperative teaching approaches that requires the adoption of methods of active learning and energetic acquisition of knowledge and skills and defines the role of the teacher as councilor, cooperator and mentor ,we will give pupils the opportunity to gain knowledge by taking part in more attractive and more interesting activites, using ICT and smart devices in teaching and learning activities.Equal opportunities will be given to all children with any kind of disabilities.Project is for children 3-6 years old.The main project aim is to improve educators and children digital and technology skills using educational robots and ICT equipment and the integration of ICT (including STEAM and robotics) in learning and teaching process of pre school education.Through using ICT and robotic equipment in daily learning activities in combination with selected activities of curriculum of pre school education, will develop their skills in research, critical and creative thinking approach.They will experiment with different materials ,will learnt through play, cooperation with other children, respecting the rules and responsibilities ,accepting the diversity.Teaching will be more interesting for the children and they will have the chance to be more active ,to explore, to observe, analyse and solve problems ,to experiment, act and they experience success in the work process.They will implement their new skills, develop the spirit of cooperation and responsibility produce themselves materials and participate in activities, feeling the joy of creativity.During the project children will share their work with children of other European countries using various web tools and internet environments and learning about the culture of the participant countries, accept their co - existences and imagining a common future, getting the sense that they are part of a larger world called Europe.The most important expected results are: -The creation of web site with learning material ,e twinning project, e books and educational games.-The development of teachers and pupils digital skill,-The Integration of ICT(including robotics and STEAM)in teaching and learning process.All results that will be created at the end of project, after cooperation between all partners will be very important , active and available for teachers around Europe.Six shools representing more than 1000 pupils from north and south of Europe will cooperate in this project and give the opportunity to staff and trainees, to increase their digital skills and trough this cooperation, strengthen their European identity.Cooperation will be continue in the future.After the project 's end, technology will be integrated to teaching and learning activities and all participate institutions will have materials, equipment, skills and knowledge about their using in learning activities.It is expected that the participating teachers will learn to use more that 50 new web tools and internet applications and will implement these skills in daily learning activities ,by giving to children a new, more attractive and more qualitative way of teaching.This project will have a long-term impact on every partner institution. It’s expected systemic changes in each participant school. Educators will improve the quality of their knowledge and their methodologies and will acquire enough skills , so they will be able to make changes to the existing curriculum that responds to the requirements of modern times ,thus achieving European added value in the quality of pre school education. We believe that this project will help to children's positive attitude towards learning and contributes to prepare European citizen of tomorrow, who have the necessary skills, respects the values of life and is preparing to be able for action and right decision for a better tomorrow.We are investing in a better world ,taking as a starting point the children.