Roll the Dice
Start date: Sep 1, 2014,
End date: Aug 31, 2016
PROJECT
FINISHED
We live in a world in constant evolution. Education has always had an important role in this evolution and we want our students to take advantage of it. We want them to move forward without forgetting our past and present times. So, we are a team of 8 schools from countries (Portugal, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Turkey, Slovakia, Bulgary and Spain) that share high unemployment rates and school dropping out. Our project focuses on the need to reconcile families and schools, make them get closer to set a real environment to produce real based tasks to motivate and engage teenager students (12 to 16) on their learning process at the same time they become socially involved citizens.
When we are children, we start learning through games. But, at a certain time in our educational process, as we grow up, we sometimes forget that games can still be part of our learning process either at school or at home. To remind all of us this, we are going to create a game for our schools. All school staff can take part in this task of our project. We will make a board game, we will make all the elements needed (cards, board, dices, counters). This activity will be highly related to our curriculums in order that students can prepare questions (including questions, mime, drawing and taboo words in their own language and/or English) related to their subjects’ curriculum or/ and their general knowledge.
All the process of creation will be discussed by all partners, so that we take advantage of all our knowledge and ideas. It will be also shared in our projects blog, so that other teachers will be able to adapt such a task easily to their school’s projects. We believe that for the benefit of our students, families and school staff need to work together. To promote this, we will open our schools to our families and to all the local communities. We will share with them our project organizing a “competition” and inviting students and parents to play with us. During our mobilities, students will cooperate together sharing questions about their own countries and playing together to learn or find out their knowledge about other countries in Europe.
As far as evolution is concerned, we have to bear in mind that we are losing our traditional games in favor to computer games. We want our community to be aware of this. We don’t reject computer games, it’s part of our evolution, and therefore technology will take an important role in our project as well. However, we want to promote traditional games and promote a good use of computer games either at school or at home. For that reason, the second part of our project will be about traditional games. We will research and share our traditional games with our partners and our communities. Families will take an important role in this part of the project again, sharing with us the games they used to play when they were at school. In our blog we will share all this knowledge, but also we will have the opportunity to play these games during our mobilities. Through games students will be able to use the target language to explain the rules and give directions to their partners. We will create real situations and relaxed environments for them to improve their skills in English.
By playing all together, sharing our activities with other students, families and other schools we set the basis for making a good use of games. We realise about the importance of playing together, sharing and getting closer to our children. In the last part of our project, we would like to think about all this and share it with our community.
For that reason, we will do activities that will lead us to some final products that we will share with our local and national institutions
through our blog and sharing brochures, but also using other useful means of communication. In order to grow conciousness on citizenship, we will organise a campaign in our community to collect toys for children for charity, we will create booklets about “Playing and learning”, “Play with your children”, “Make good use of games”, “Let’s play together”, etc. or/ and role plays about these topics that we will share in you tube.
During our project, all partners will work close together in order to improve our lessons, teaching methodology and the use of ict tools. First of all, through communicating tools like hangouts and social networks we have already started improving our skills and getting used to new tools for some of us like google+ and skype. We will also create a database with games that we can use in our lessons and share it in the project's blog.
In conclusion, this project has been enthusiastically designed in response to a current need in our society to reconcile school and families, as well as learning and amusement, for the unique benefit of our students and therefore our society. We want our children to enjoy learning and be aware of their learning process. Let’s learn to improve our present and move forward to the future!