������Ƶ

Kiitos @ 21st-Century Preschools

According to , every citizen should have the opportunity to acquire at least two foreign languages from an early age. The project furthered that goal through an integrated pedagogical approach combining 21st-century skills and the learning of a second language. Music also featured heavily in the project, as it has been shown to stimulate perceptual, physical, language, cognitive and social-emotional skills. The project was implemented with 213 children attending the public preschool system in Portugal.

Another important objective of the project addressed the needs of preschool teachers, specialised teachers and school leaders, supporting them in developing a 21st-century learning environment, where collaboration takes centre stage.

Some of the most notable outcomes were a , , , and a . Most of these are available in .

Kiitos @ 21st-Century Preschools was an Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership that ran from 2015 to 2018 and involved organisations from Italy, Poland, Portugal and Turkey. It has been labelled a good practice example.

Take Me Out

When the project began, preschools in Slovakia put a lot more emphasis on areas like information processing and mathematics than on health and physical movement: in the state educational programme, the former had 47 performance indicators, while the latter only had 13.

To achieve a better balance, the project turned to the outdoor education practices that first emerged in Scandinavia in the 1950s. Some countries, like the United Kingdom, have hundreds of “forest schools” as an alternative to mainstream education, while others are mostly unfamiliar with the concept. The project aimed to make outdoor education accessible to more countries, citing benefits to children’s self-confidence, social skills, language skills, gross and fine motor skills, well-being and more.

Outputs include a , a series of , an overview of the  and on the outdoor approach. These are available in all project languages.

Take Me Out was an Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership that ran from 2016 to 2018 and involved organisations from Denmark, Estonia, Slovakia and the United Kingdom. It has been labelled a .

Developing Teacher Competences for the Future

Openness, readiness and capacity for lifelong learning are some of the most important qualities for the preschool teacher. Because they need to work with people from different age groups and to understand parental expectations, communication and collaboration are also paramount. The project sought to equip its participants with these skills by organising workshops on ten different topics:

1. All are welcome
2. Respecting diversity
3. Competences needed for cooperation and partnership with family
4. Partnership with parents, collaboration with family
5. Support to families
6. Communication
7. Contemporary forms of cooperation between families and institutions
8. Child as an active participant of partnership with parents
9. Work with parents in sensitive situations
10. Empowering parents

Slides from these workshops are . In addition to these workshops, participants were presented with a special curriculum and went on to train 189 preschool teachers in their own countries. The project partners also contributed to a textbook that the Croatian Ministry of Education used in ECEC teachers’ initial education, while another textbook based on the project was published in the United Kingdom.

DTC was an Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership that ran from 2015 to 2018, engaging organisations from Croatia, Greece, Norway, Poland and the United Kingdom. It has been labelled a .