On the Wings of Legends.

When starting our collaboration, our main interest was to promote reading and engage our pupils in reading and enrich their multiliteracy skills. As we processed our theme, we got the idea of exploring tales and legends of all six partner countries and via them to arise the knowledge of European cultural heritage simultaneously. We wanted to combine digital education with some activities to make learning even more fascinating. Using legends as their starting point, our pupils can create their own updated versions and products of legends, but to be able to do that, they have to know the original stories.On the Wings of Legends (OWL - the bird symbol of Greek mythology Goddess Athena) is a multiliteracy project designed for primary school pupils. We take a bird’s eye view at different legends from different cultures and use their wings to fly from country to country. Besides introducing students to traditional tales and legends, they see how they compare to those in other countries. We break our project down into four different categories:History/MythologyRomance/LoveOrigin/TraditionGeography/Natureand use these categories to help us with our timetable of activities over the two years of our project. Students and teachers from the six primary partner schools, Palaifyto (Greece), Helsinki (Finland), La Chapelle Janson (France), Tapioszolos (Hungary), Prats de Lluçanès (Spain) and Margaretting (U.K.) will work towards the following objectives:Improving multiliteracy skills and reading, writing, speaking and creativity skillsRaising awareness of European cultural heritage, particularly through the literatureDeveloping social and communication skillsDelivering effective high-quality teaching using innovative and student-centred pedagogical approachesPractising foreign language skills in authentic interactionsPromoting reading at school and at home for developing thinking skills and media literacy skillsEngaging bilingual/multilingual children in the processes of learningMaking Early Reading inclusive for all the children, including children with specific needsDeveloping ICT-skillsWe use eTwinning as our main platform in our collaboration. Our eTwinning project has already been created. Our outputs at Twinspace will be seen for anyone interested and as a window to communicate with outer world (parents, associations and local community). The OWL-magazine which consists of four chapters (one for each category) will be published at Twinspace and also printed and distributed among students. Our project blog will be published at Twinspace. It consists of our pupils’ rap lyrics, poems, movies, animations and games. Twinspace offers versatile possibilities to differentiate and individualise the learning processes, and everyone can participate fully and challenge oneself.Before creating any products children will read one legend story per month, 20 stories altogether. In this process we will use reading workshops containing storylines,drama pedagogy, creative writing and illustrating. We will study subject areas like literacy, history, science, English language, visual arts and music when exploring the stories. Reading supervisors, as the peer support, help pupils with learning or linguistic difficulties together with teachers. Encouraging and educating parents in their mutual daily reading routines with their children, helps reaching the goal of reading for pleasure.16 OWL-Theme Days are essential part of this project. There is one day in each month - from 11/2019 to 06/2020 and from 10/2020 to 05/2021- with special events and activities in all partner schools culminating in LTT-weeks. These theme days are analysed in the project's timetable. Dedicated OWL-spot corners in every school disseminate the project activities. Our core principle is to involve pupils who have fewer opportunities and face different difficulties and obstacles, such as social or cultural obstacles, economic difficulties or learning challenges, even school dropouts. We have been discussing these difficulties together and the support we could provide to these groups of pupils. The project itself also helps to raise the equality value among the pupils since many actions are supported by the budget (such as mobilities). School performance correlates more directly with children’s reading scores than any other single indicator. Cultural heritage features societal value promoting intergenerational dialogue and lifelong learning. Our dissemination aims on three main target groups where the project will spread its impact: pupils, teachers and families, local and national institutions, the general public. The dissemination activities, the regular updates of each partner school websites and the project blog, the involvement of families, local authorities and community, will improve the knowledge of the European dimension of education, in the consideration that schools need to be open to dialogue and cooperation.