Parents' School

<< Background >>The number and the diversity of the international families was growing in all partner schools in Estonia, France and Germany. On the bright side, international families brough their culture and brightness to the school. At the same time , the new stage brought challenges for the partner schools. The communication with international parents and building trust with them was not easy due to language and cultural difference. Furthermore, it was difficult to provide the information to parents and make it easy for them to understand how the school systems worked. Different cultural backgrounds resulted in various expectations from parents regarding how school works, communication manners and times with teachers, school visiting hours, school life, methods of supporting child at home, etc. The need for all the partner schools were to establish common grounds with parents and teachers to support better to the children, help them understand school reality. << Objectives >>With the implementation of the projects, there were goals to achieve. Parents: - are better involved in school and community life (priority: civic engagement and participation), - understand and integrate into the local school system, thus feeling included in the decision-making processes (priority: inclusion and diversity),- know how to support and to understand their child at home (priority: common values),- cooperate with the teachers and school staff to support their child, thus ensuring a more positive and supportive working environment for the teachers and staff and contributing to their physical and mental well-being (priority: supporting teachers and school staff), - cooperate with other parents and benefit from an intercultural learning activity, by sharing their culture and civic society experiences (priority: inclusion and diversity, civic engagement).As a result of the project a support material containing workshop guidelines and video situations will be elaborated forother organisations to use.<< Implementation >>Throughout the project the partner schools conducted activities:Preparatory Visit Development of the Strategic plan and Scenarios Video creation Workshops for parents Festival of different cultures Elaboration of workshop guidelines and support materialsProject management - organizational support << Results >>Throughout the project partner schools produced six videos around the topic: supporting children during language immersion, supporting children at home, social media harassment, screen addiction, mobbing, why do children lie at home. Based on the videos, the workshops for the parents were conducted. The products were used to achieve results such as: increased expat family involvement in school life introduction, they started to better understanding of how to support children at home, ways to manage screen addiction and prevention from social media harassment. As a result of the thorough work with parents, they requested continuation of the supportive workshops around the same core topics. The partner schools started to plan more intercultural events and our teachers also started to think about different ways of inclusion.