Art of Reading, Reading into Art Erasmus Project

Project Title

Art of Reading, Reading into Art

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : School Exchange Partnerships

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Key Competences (incl. mathematics and literacy) – basic skills; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Creativity and culture

Project Summary

Schools have an important duty in educating pupils to be capable and active citizens of their communities locally, nationally, Europe wide and world wide. Literacy is the key to be able to learn other skills and to participate. Almost every child learns to read technically, but nowadays many IT activities have taken the place of reading for fun. As an outcome childrens’ vocabulary and reading comprehension have become poorer. Our duty as teachers is to try to make literature reading enchanting and rewarding in order to guarantee the future citizens’ ability to be multiliterate, which is a lifeline to develop as humans. In this project we try to make stories and literature in general more intriguing by the means of visual arts. Most children are enchanted by stories. With the help of our methods and activities in this project children get to express and share their experiences of stories with peers in other countries and hopefully thus find or strengthen their joy of reading. Their mutual working language English might be imperfect, but the language of visual art is speechless and thus international.

We all participants do a lot this work already in our schools in our home countries, but we find it important and motivating to add an European aspect to our work. In today’s insecure world we can show our children that we are not isolated and only minding business of our own, but are an important part of the European community, which offers us opportunities to learn from other nations and develop together.

In this project we have four schools of four countries: Greece, Italy, Spain and Finland. One way or another, we will involve about a thousand pupils and their parents, 130 school staff members and four communal libraries with their customers and staff.

Selected groups of 10-12 year old pupils and their teachers will visit each other’s schools, school libraries and communal libraries and between the mobilities we will have several activities under our topic art and literature which concern all pupils of the schools. We aim to inspire and encourage each other in the field of literature by the means of art and have several same activities that produce us material for communal library exhibitions which will be held during the mobilities. We will stay in close contact and share experiences monthly by Skype, email,Google Drive, eTwinning and WhatsApp.

We see our activities as a circle: first we get a book from the library, secondly we will be inspired by the book and do art work in which we express our reading experience, thirdly we have an art exhibition in a communal library. These exhibitions can reach quite big live audiences and make Erasmus+ known.

Our project is a circle where pupils are in the middle improving their reading skills and motivation. Teachers provide and introduce different kind of stories to enrich the reading skills and motivate the pupils to express themselves by art and to read more. This project will help our kids and our learning community at large to fall back in love with the written word and the slow pace of discovering how a story unfolds by reading a book, page after page.

We consider life long learning ultimately important, together with others in our home countries and abroad. Along with exchanging good practices and culture change and improving our ICT skills we can develop our language skills, especially English but also teach and learn some words and phrases of Finnish, Italian, Spanish and Greek. We hope that through this project both pupils and teachers will make important life long European contacts.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 109460 Eur

Project Coordinator

Muijalan koulu & Country: FI

Project Partners

• 1st Primary School of Agios Nikolaos-Crete-Greece 9320055
• ASSOCIAZIONE SCUOLA MONTESSORI
• CRA ELENA FORTÚN