Healthier breakfast, wiser minds Erasmus Project

Project Title

Healthier breakfast, wiser minds

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 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Health and wellbeing; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

To enhance the acquisition of Key competences of our students, in order to better prepare them for their future as adults, through the implementation of new methodologies and innovation in the use of digital technologies in the classroom, was the main objective of the project. We focused on improving the PBL methodology (project based learning) which most of the partner schools had already worked with, but this time it included a newness: A PROJECT BASED ON A REAL PROJECT WITH REAL OBJECTIVES AND CHALLENGES. The lead team of students of the 5 schools became an international working group with a common and real objective: to promote, and improve, the healthy eating habits of their classmates by focusing on breakfast. They were going to be, with the guidance and help of the teachers, those who investigated, designed a promotion plan and felt the protagonists of the activities carried out at school and outside. They simulated an international work group with multidisciplinary tasks that allowed them to improve their skills and abilities (create surveys, analyze them, devise promotional campaigns, design healthy eating workshops for other classmates or other schools, manage social networks …).
Groups of promoter students and teachers were created in each of the participating centers to lead the project, but local activities involved the entire educational community, including families, which was made possible thanks to the dissemination and training activities led by our promoter students. And we didn’t fulfil that, we also tried to involve other local schools with our workshops and magazines.
Local and transnational activities formed a continuum since they were rings of the same chain to achieve our objectives: for students, to improve breakfast habits in the educational community and for teachers, together with the obvious objective of students, also to innovate in methodological practice (PBL, ICT). Students played an important role in decision-making regarding activities and promotion, as we realized that this project was not only enhancing their acquisition of more academic key competences such as linguistics, mathematics, science, but also that of personal, social, business initiative and learning to learn ones. In other words, we were promoting the key competences that every person needs for their personal fulfillment and development and for their employability, social inclusion and active citizenship in their adult life, achieving, along the way, another priority of the project, which was social inclusion. In fact, in international meetings we “played” to be journalists, speakers, statesmen, teachers … We created work environments such as those in which certain professions are developed and the students felt as such.
To organize all local and transnational work, a Twinspace was created for the association, which was very useful for asynchronous work and document repository. Other platforms such as MEET, Google Drive, Padlet, ISSUU were used for online work.
During the 30 months of the project, 5 physical and 1 virtual mobilities were carried out. The first was teacher training to acquire knowledge about the theme of our project (healthy breakfast and relationship with school performance); 4 were student mobility and the students of the driving teams participated in them. The last one was virtual, due to mobility restrictions caused by the pandemic, but it gave us the opportunity to take a leap in the use of digital technologies for synchronous online work. Students with financial difficulties participated in all of them.
The project activities, led by the students, were very varied. Some examples:
-Creation and analysis of initial surveys
-3 magazines
-Blog with healthy breakfast recipes
-YouTube channel with healthy and cheap recipes (so that everyone could make them)
-Healthy eating workshops
-5 healthy breakfast campaigns for the whole school
-Healthy breakfast Instagram account
The teachers designed a pedagogical material to work with the PBL methodology in a real project and a compendium of workshops on healthy eating taking care of the ideas suggested by the students.
This project has shown us that it is possible to learn and motivate students through new methodologies but above all by putting them as the protagonists of a project with real objectives. Teachers have been able to share a multitude of new practices among the participating schools and there is no doubt that many will remain in our centers for future projects.
It goes without saying that with all the work to promote healthy breakfast we have managed to make at least one group of students and families in our schools aware of its importance.

Project Website

https://www.brewise.org/

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 147255 Eur

Project Coordinator

INSTITUT CELESTÍ BELLERA & Country: ES

Project Partners

• Escola Secundária Manuel Cargaleiro
• Pelecu pamatskola
• Szkola Podstawowa Nr 3 im. Janusza Korczaka
• Elementary school Kozala