Developing Social Competences of Children with Early Childhood Language Learning Erasmus Project

Project Title

Developing Social Competences of Children with Early Childhood Language Learning

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 : Strategic Partnerships for Schools Only

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Creativity and culture; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Teaching and learning of foreign languages

Project Summary

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.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 86555 Eur

Project Coordinator

Osnovna sola Prezihovega Voranca Bistrica & Country: SI

Project Partners

• Preschool Põngerjas
• école maternelle les Jardins VEDENE
• ISTITUTO COMPRENSIVO DANTE ALIGHIERI VIA GIOVANNI XXIII, 14 – OPERA (MI)
• DG Zhelyazko Popnikolov