yEUr Water - Row on it! Care for it!

Six schools from four different countries (Germany, France, Italy and Spain) and with different needs want to use synergetic effects to reach their goals. Whereas the French and Italian Junior High Schools set the focus on tackling early school leaving and disabilities, the three Grammar Schools in Germany and Spain contribute to increase their levels of achievement and interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics and support a targeted use of foreign languages in these subjects.The participating schools dispose of different know-how when it comes to the fulfilment of the project. The partner schools in France and Italy have already successfully achieved a KA2 project. The other schools are KA2-newcomers, eventhough they have been gathering valuable experience in students' exchange activities for years. The coordinating school has been certified as an eTwinning-School this year.In a period of 32 months, 150 pupils aged 12 to 15 are going to take part in short-term mobilities and 16 pupils aged 14 to 16 are going to achieve a long-term mobilitiy. The main goal of the project is to lead all its participants to a responsible and sustainable handling of water. Watersport activities in several settings (rowing pools, canals, rivers, seas,...) will lead the participants to understand the project as a contribution to their health and well-being and, additionally, to experience water as a place where they can meet and live different experiences. Moreover, they will develop a code of behaviour and rules to apply in each surrounding. This step will enable the participants to apprehend water as a valuable ecosystem, which should be appreciated and treated with care.The short-term activities will also set the focus on aspects determined by the regional characteristics and the specific expertise of the organising schools. The variety of the settings will make the participants concerned about water consumption, water treatment, water supply for local agriculture, water tourism, drinking water quality and pollution, European water politicy, water as a green source of energy, human intervention in natural water dynamic. These aspects and related surveys will enable the participants to apprehend water in all its characteristics (physical, biological, symbolic, environmental, energetic...) and its significance for humans, their home and regions in particular and also for the environment and the ecosystem on a European scale in general. Therefore, if our goals are met, the participants will reflect upon their behaviour and draw environmentally friendly conclusions about how to handle sustainably with water as a valuable natural resource.All the presentations made for the project and the results of the mobilities are to be collected on the TwinSpace and be accessible to the public mode. At the same time, we plan to create an online magazine with all the relevant information about the contents of our project which shall be reused in further teaching lessons. Furthermore, some parts of it are planned to be published to enable further target groups profit from the content of our project although they could not participate actively in it.The wide content of the project will allow the active involvement of the teachers of several departments such as Physical Education, Geography, Physics, Biology, History, Art, ICT or foreign languages, mainly English. In addition to their usual teaching, further qualification of teachers through training on eTwinning and Web 2.0 tools will be necessary to be able to work efficiently and convey some contents using a foreign language, in that case English. This project also aims to support those teachers according to their needs and therefore, we plan three teachers' meetings within the project, which should contribute to the further qualification of teachers through training on eTwinning and Web 2.0 tools and further training in the field of bilingual teaching. These teachers' meeting will also support the associated goals of contributing to the internationalization and expansion of the teaching range through the elaboration of bilingual modules in all the schools involved in the project.