Physical and mental health rebalance Erasmus Project

Project Title

Physical and mental health rebalance

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 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: International cooperation, international relations, development cooperation; Health and wellbeing; Creativity and culture

Project Summary

The project’s name is LIKE, which is an acronym of the following Hungarian phrase: innovative and creative collaboration for physical and mental health. The mental health of our kindergarten’s children, their parents, and the kindergarten’s employees is extremely important for us. Paying attention to mental health has been one of our emphasized tasks in the recent years among folk traditions, environmental education, and improving national identity. All the employees of our institution are committed to this topic and most of the latest conferences, advanced studies and lectures have been organized around it. We have earned a lot of connected titles, e.g. Green Kindergarten, Bird-friendly Kindergarten, Happy Kindergarten, “Így tedd rá” (the title of a Hungarian folksong) Reference Institution. We often hold open days during which we try to give insight about our professional work. We all agree that people should never stop studying and there are always “good practices” that we can identify ourselves with and we can include them in our kindergarten’s everyday life.
After we have read the tender, we collectively decided that we would like to share our previously gained knowledge with others and we would be grateful if we could learn from other institutions as well. We have got a continuous relationship with the district’s other kindergartens so we are already familiar with their work. We dreamt big, we are very curious so we would love to have a look at the work of other country’s kindergartens. We were inspired by this passion and we started the project.
It was not easy to find the right partners for the project. A lot of institutions were interested in the project initially, however most of them left after seeing the required work behind the project. Finally we have found two great partners, we hope that our collaboration will be fruitful, because “we speak the same language”.
We have chosen three topics that are connected to the project and built on each other. We highlighted the topic of “health and well-being”, this is the foundation of our collaboration. Our aim is to preserve the health of our institutions’ children, parents and workers. We find it important that the children who attend our institution acquire basic knowledge about health preservation at a relatively early age. According to WHO “health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” The focus of all our activities is health preservation. By these activities we mean saying poems and rhymes, telling fairy tales, singing, playing music, dancing, movements, drawing, painting, handicraft, or activities that aim at getting to know the world actively. We would like to also include the parents in this, we plan to give them lectures and we would like to teach them through their children.
Preserving the employees’ mental health has caused difficulties for years in the 21st century. We have organized several lectures about the topics of burn-out and the importance of the role of educators. Unfortunately employees sometimes become disappointed, they are hard to motivate because there are more and more children with special education needs. It is very sad that our country, Hungary, has been struggling with educator shortage in the recent years. It’s the management’s task to motivate the educators and to make sure that they prevent burn-out before it happens.
We hope that after participating in this project, the employees of our institution will be able to rejuvenate professionally, they will be charged with positivity and they can continue their job with the children in this spirit. I hope that we will be able to share our experience with the locals, the district’s kindergartens, or even on an international level. We wish that the children who attend our kindergarten will be more cooperative, more inclusive, and more open-minded. We would also include the parents. This way they will also become more open-minded. We would like to cooperate with our partners, think together with them and hopefully we will find solutions for problems together.
The partners and the coordinator institution will include 4-5 educators in the project directly, however all the employees and children (cc. 200-250) of all the institutions will take part in the project indirectly. They are not “mobile”, they will take part through the active educators online (e.g. video messages), via small gifts or postcards. They will be able to keep in touch with the other institutions this way.
We would like our programmes to be open, so other kindergartens’ employees will be able to get an insight to the project and the professional collaboration. To finish the project we plan to publish a paper that includes all the “good practices”, ideas and games in different topics that we have created with our partners. The partners all agreed that we would like to work together and collaborate even after the project has ended

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 53885 Eur

Project Coordinator

Csetényi Óvoda és Mini Bölcsőde & Country: HU

Project Partners

• Scoala Gimnaziala “BETHLEN SAMUEL”
• Materská škola s vyučovacím jazykom maďarským – Óvoda