Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Welcome to Junior Inventors!

Junior Inventors is a Socrates Comenius 1 School project, financed by the European Comission.

“Junior inventors” has as its main objective the discovery of the games and toys that European children, economically disadvantaged, invent to have fun and to collect them in a book to be published in English and the languages of the partner countries.
The project’s aim is to put into value the children’s creativity and inventiveness.
The research work and the collection of games will be carried out by teams of teachers and students from the European countries involved in the project, and the target groups for the research will be made of groups of children aged 6/7 - 14/15. The children’s games will be observed for some time to find out what kind of games they play in the street with their friends, the materials they use in their games. It is interesting to see if they play with ready-made materials or self-made materials.


The end products of the project will be: a book containing the games collected during the project, to be published in English and in the partner countries’ languages, a CD containing the video recording of the games, and in the case of the Romanian team, an optional class “The English Club” to be integrated in the extracurricular activity; a blog and a website.

The concrete aims of this project are:
To put into value the games and toys that economically disadvantaged children invent to have fun, and collect these games in a book to be published in English and the languages of the European partner countries.

To involve children in the research team work.
To motivate children to learn foreign languages in order to communicate with their peers from abroad. To motivate pupils and teachers to use modern information and communication technologies
To enhance cultural exchanges among pupils and teachers using children’s most favourite leisure activities: games.
To find ways of enabling the disadvantaged children to find out that other children who cannot afford expensive toys and games will share their games with them

Expected impact:
Ø The pupils will learn how to value their creative potential
Ø The pupils will be motivated to improve their foreign languages abilities in order to communicate with their peer partners
Ø The work on the project will develop pupils’ abilities to read, speak and write in English.
Ø Both teachers and pupils will be motivated to improve their skills in using information and communication technologies
Ø The pupils will learn how to work in a team and how to negotiate and co-operate within a team
Ø The teachers will be motivated to integrate the project activities in the curriculum and to use their creativity to enrich their teaching methods and share their innovative initiatives with other colleagues. They will also benefit from the information and experience exchanges with teachers from the other European project partners.
Ø The inter-cultural exchanges among the pupils and teachers will help combat racism/xenophobia and promote tolerance towards other people
Ø In the long term, the local community will benefit from the project by better understanding children’s needs for communication with adults.
Ø It will provide the teachers and educational communities information to help them counsel and guide the pupils according to their interests and skills.
Ø The project will help people realize that children can be creative enough when they want to.
Ø By opening the minds of the present students, we can ensure the development of tomorrow’s open-minded citizens.


The dissemination will be made by various means:
- By public presentations and exhibitions with students’ work and pictures of all the partner schools
- In local and regional teachers’ meetings
- In the local mass media
- In such occasions as the “Spring Day in Europe”, “Europe’s Day”, “the European Day of Foreign Languages”, etc
- On the project blog and website.

The schools involved in the project are:

PROJECT COORDINATOR:



SCOALA CU CLASELE I - VIII NR. 5 BAIA MARE , ROMANIA

PARTNERS:



75. YIL KIRKÖY PANSİYONLU İLKÖĞRETİM OKULU, KIRKÖY, TURKEY



LICEUM OGOLNOKSZTALCACE UMIEJETNOSCI TWORCZYCH (HIGH SCHOOL OF CREATIVE SKILLS) LODZ, POLAND

The first Project meeting is going to be held in early November in Baia Mare, Romania.

2 comments:

Mariana Hudrea said...

I wish you best of luck in this beautiful project.

Mariana

Daniel said...

Felicitari pentru initiativa si mult succes in derularea activitatilor pe care vi le-ati programat!

Daniel Lozba
http://www.euroscoala.ro