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Sal y disfruta aprendiendo
Start date: Jun 1, 2015, End date: May 31, 2016 PROJECT  FINISHED 

We live in an age of globalization, social encounters and exchange of knowledge, which makes it necessary for education to evolve and adapt to modern times in order to guarantee the best educational environment for students as well as for teachers. Similarly, environmental education has become a global priority and the European Union has established climate change control and sustainable energy development as two of their goals for 2020. At the Escola Bressol Municipal Balàfia, due to our absolute coincidence with these goals, we have carried out a needs analysis in order to find out how to reach our goal of updating and internationalizing our school and develop a culture based on environmental values and sustainability. In order to outline a plan of future development for our educational project, we have formulated a training plan for teachers named ‘Get out and enjoy as you learn’, thus motivating teachers to embrace a change that promotes health, wellness and teachers’ professional development. Our project consists of a language course, necessary to develop foreign language skills and increase the school internationalization, and a course to learn the theoretical foundations and methodological principles of the methodology known as ‘Outdoor learning’, based on the use of natural spaces as learning resources and successfully implemented in different European countries. Theoretical courses will provide the theoretical foundations that will help us develop our school development plan. We have also planned the visit to two European schools which are successfully implementing this methodology in the early stages of education in order to observe their practical implementation of the methodology and learn how to apply in practice the previously acquired theoretical knowledge. The two schools we aim to visit are an English eco-school (Bowburn Infant and Nursery School) that has received European awards for their approach linking nature and education and their promotion of environmental awareness among children, and a Norwegian school (Kulturparken FUS barnehage as) that has been using nature and cultural institutions as regular learning spaces. Four teachers from the Escola Bressol Municipal Balàfia (out of a total of 17) will take part in this project with the specific aim to develop expertise in this methodology, in the acquisition of linguistic competence and the commitment to creating a new plan of school development and disseminating the results obtained in the project. The results obtained with the project ‘Get out and enjoy as you learn’ will serve as the basis for a new School Educational Project that will include the following actions: the gradual implementation of the new methodology; a new design of the school playground transforming it into an outdoor learning space; the use of the school vegetable garden as a source of organic products for children; the elaboration of a project aimed at conducting more outdoor activities and actively engaging local cultural institutions in contributing to the education of the school children and increasing the desire to learn; the future organization of bilingual groups that promote the learning a foreign language from the very first educational stage; and the elaboration of a plan of dissemination of results and acquired knowledge and competencies, including talks, seminars, open door activities… Our experience implementing all these measures will benefit the 17 schools in the local network of municipal kindergartens as well as other schools and institutions in the region.
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