CONTEXT/BACKGROUND OF THE PROJECT:Our project “Books can build bridges” opened up opportunities for students to deal with European history and European literature in creating a history book and a literary history of the five participating nations. It was the teachers’ objective was to encourage a European competence among their students that includes a critical view of today’s Europe as well as a sense of tradition.Teachers of five schools, who share educational aims and a strongly pro-European view came together via e-twinning and started a project whose subject contributed considerably to an intellectual advancement of the students and spread the European idea both within the schools and also in the public that was involved in our project.OBJECTIVESOur paramount aim was to enable our students to become active and responsible citizens and to engage with the idea of European unity while maintaining cultural variety in the different parts of Europe. This aim was reached in particular by creating a European history book that dealt with the history of the EU.In order to achieve that aim a number of competences were required.Therefore our project promoted:- German language skills (writing a novel, reading texts and working with them). English was often used in the communication between the students;- Skills in reading and learning (reading texts, writing texts, interpreting scenes from films etc.);- Cultural awareness, historical and political awareness and the ability to use cultural terminology;- General and vocational education and training (preparation for university studies);- Mathematical and scientific competence (collecting and evaluating statistical data)- Digital competence (digital presentation of project results; use of computers to communicate with partners);- Social competence (cooperation of students of the different partner schools).NUMBER AND PROFILE OF PARTICIPANTSSchools from five different countries were involved in our project: apart from the German coordinating school there were schools from Italy, Poland, Hungary and Turkey. All school took part in Comenius projects before.DESCRIPTION OF ACTIVITIESThe student activities demanded intellectual, creative, technological and social skills: Pupils read and worked with European literary and historical texts; they made their own films and wrote their own texts, thus creating new works of art; they used a variety of modern media to gather information and to communicate. In their work and communication with students from the partner schools they learned to work together in a product-oriented way in mixed-nationality groups.CARRYING OUT THE PROJECTIn the months between the working meetings in the different countries the students worked in groups specifically formed for the different project activities. E-twinning and e-mails were used to plan and coordinate the different steps and to record the results of their work that were presented and finished during the next meeting. Moreover, the students mostly stayed in families during their visits to the other countries, they also spend some days together in at a boarding school. Thus they found out about everyday life in different countries, and they also took part at lessons at school.RESULTS AND IMPACT Our results are books in both digital form and print:1.A literary history of the participating countries by young people for young people2. Creative products dealing with literature: booktrailers, Comics made of fairy tales and legends, modernized fairy tales, a calender that encourages reading3. Project novel “Journey through Europe”4. European history book5. Historical tours of the towns6. Texts of the poetry slam7. Video film of the poetry slam8. Artwork: “Angel of three cultures” 9. Creative artworks made with books10. Presentation: A short philosophy of language, reading and writing: “Looking at limits”.POTENTIAL LONG-TERM BENEFITS- Implementation of project results into school curricula (History, Language and Literature, Philosophy, Religion)- Books in schools and public libraries; digital books on our project homepage, products on the European project results platform