Move your body – help your mind Erasmus Project

Project Title

Move your body – help your mind

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: Early School Leaving / combating failure in education; Health and wellbeing

Project Summary

Young people’s everyday life is nowadays characterized by the intensive use of digital media and a lack of physical exercise. As a consequence of this lack of exercise arise already at a young age both physical and psychological problems, as for example high blood pressure and backache. The school daily routine is characterized by a lack of movement too. Thinking blockades, but also cognitive learning weaknesses can arise as a consequence of a too inactive and overloaded learning behaviour.

Our project „Move your body – help your mind“ aims to promote the health of school students by motivating them for physical exercise. The project should also comprise kinaesthetic aspects which are meant to concretely improve the learning outcomes through physical movement as well as support on how to handle with health apps avoiding a further stress from the use of these.
The three partner schools are located in Germany and Finland and had very different starting situations and connecting factors concerning the topic of the project.

The school in Forssa/Finland is already experienced in the field of digitalization of its learning contents and methods and must therefore struggle more with the side effects of this. At the same time this school has extensive experience with international projects. The second Finnish school in Ulvila (about 150 Km far away from Forssa) is a smaller school with no international experience so far, but which is already running a project on the topic of physical movement. This school is among others interested to explore the field of kinesthetics. The coordinating school in Waiblingen/Germany wants to be prepared for the increasing digitalization in school and to counteract the lack of physical exercise of its students with low-threshold exercise programms, which can be put in practice anytime and everywhere, since the school itself does not own a sports hall. Through this project the IB school in Waiblingen also intended to fight the problem of premature school dropout.
The students approached the topic of sports and physical exercise in an experimental and intercultural way. Thanks to the development of concrete physical programms within the mixed project groups the students became active actors and had the possibility to pass these exercise programms to other schoolmates. In this way they acquired a model role which strenghtened their self-confidence and also their social competences. During the project the participants have been involved in different ways in the organisation and the implementation of the project. For example at the beginning a survey has been drafted and then conducted and there have been intercultural days open for the whole school community. The exercise programmes have been prepared, tested and documented by the students themselves supported by different teachers. Furthermore the students made video-clips which are presented at the porject homepage.

In the time between the exchanges the students of the three schools communicated with each other through WhatsApp improving in this way their language and social competences. eTwinning was only used in project-lessons. The students have also brought their own experiences in the evaluation of some existing health apps and presented the best of them at the final event.

At the end of the project there have been short physical exercises which can be practised during the breaks or during the free hours and which will not recquire any particular facilities. Another final product of the project is a collection of kinaesthetic exercises, which are ready to use to find at the project homepage. These exercises can become integral part of the teaching activities or can be used at home as a learning method.
All these programms will be documented at the projekt-homepage and can be used by everyone. In the three schools the coaches and the teachers will pass the results from school year to school year by selecting and training new sport coaches. Specially in the finish schools. At the school in Waiblingen there are organised structures for this still missing. The schoolmates who will benefit from these programmes serve as multipliers.

This project hence offers a good possibility to fight the increasing lack of physical exercise of the young generation with very concrete suggestions and to contrast the negative consequences of growing digitalization.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 87474 Eur

Project Coordinator

IB Berufliche Schulen Waiblingen, Internationaler Bund e.V. & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Forssan yhteislyseo
• Ulvilan lukio