KA1 – Feeling at home

Siže projekta u aplikacionom formularu

Naziv projekta 2017-1-RS01-KA101-000156

Feeling at Home – Creating harmonious and collaborative classroom environment for children from underprivileged groups in prevention of early school leaving

Olga Milosevic is situated in the neighborhood of a big Roma settlement and the settlement which was twice attacked by the severe floods. Therefore the social background of the students’ families is quite complex. For this reason there is a high risk of early school leaving since the families migrate a lot in search for economical support, the children are often sent to work and their motivation and learning outcomes are rather low.

In this respect we want our staff to get knowledge and skills to face this problem in a holistic, innovative and fruitful way. The objectives of the project is to reduce the level of drop out by raising motivation and satisfaction of the target group of students, to enable teachers to implement individualized teaching approach with them, to involve their parents in the educational system. This will be done through attending the training on this topic, by doing the teaching assignment of our teacher in the school which is a good example of work in the similar environment. Moreover we will benefit a lot from learning with teachers from different countries which will be a great opportunity to exchange the teaching models, tools and experience and for intercultural learning.

As the result of the project we envisage the much lower rate of dropout, acquiring a positive and inspiring learning environment for all the children of our school and in the future, through implementing the acquired procedures we see our school as the place where „Education for“ all is fostered.

At the end of the project we will have

– increased competences in teaching the students with the high risk of dropout,

– acquired skills to implement individualised teaching approach,

– ability to use tools and techniques with students with emotional problems,

– ability to better communicate and motivate parents of the target group to get involved in education of  their children,

– acquired innovative tools to foster students motivation for learning,

– increased intercultural awareness,

– increased ability to cooperate with other European schools in future project.

Siže projekta po završetku

The project FEELING AT HOME lasted twelve months. The main activities of the project were two mobilities. First mobility was a structured course in Malta with the title Non-formal for inclusion methods in inclusive education which was attended by two participants. The second mobility was the teaching assignment in 18th primary school of Peristeri, Greece. The teacher of English spent two weeks working with different ages of students in applying the Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences in the English classes and getting them learn about the culture of Serbia through songs, dances, folk tale and traditional Serbian recipes.

After the mobilities, the participants gave presentations of their assignments during school staff meetings, workshops, open classes, on the ELTA international conferences. Moreover, the dissemination was done on eTwinning portal in the form of one eTwinning project, two eTwinning events in the preparatory phase of the mobilities  (LETTERS WITH A HEART, FLAVOURS OF EUROPE), one eTwinning project during the implementation (TIDE -Together for Intercultural and Diverse Europe, Zajedno za interkulturalnu Europu prepunu različitosti), one eTwinning event in the final stage of the project ( FEELING AT HOME – KA1 PROJECT DISSEMINATION)

Another aspect of our activities during the project is to include as much as possible the students from disadvantaged families who do not have a supportive enough environment to come to school and to make progress in acquiring knowledge. They usually have a great rate of absenteeism and are at risk of dropout.

First we set the habit of calling the parents of these students for informative talks enabling them to tell us what the reasons for their children’s absenteeism are. In some cases we succeeded in helping them solve the problems.

Another practice introduced was to engage these students and sometimes their parents in extracurricular activities of the school. The school has focused efforts on setting up different kinds of projects in collaboration with institutions on local and national levels. Some of them were planting vegetables in our garden, collecting tin and other recyclable items, Earth Hour, Making toys and cakes and selling them to the community and raising funds to help other students, thus involving them in voluntary and humanitarian activities.

The target group of the children gained more self-confidence, gained skills and knowledge which were set as aims of these projects and started feeling more at home at school.

The rate of absenteeism was noticeably lower toward the end of the project duration.