Feel the Four Seasons Beyond the Walls

"Our project 'Feel the Four Seasons Beyond the Walls' was based on outdoor learning which is also supported education method by the Ministries of Education. 'Outdoor learning' is a known and popular method in the 21st century.Its necessity and inevitable efficiency on learning is accepted with good works and samples.It absolutely provides well-performing education . We designed a strategic partnership project about learning outside the classroom by strengthening educational ties with European schools. We were seven partner schools coming together on the e-twinning platform : 24th Primary School Volos (Volos,GREECE) as the coordinator school, Osnovno uchilishte Hristo Smirnenski (Rakovski,BULGARIA), Osnovna skola Bilje (Bilje/CROATIA), I.C.Sant'Elia-Commenda (Brindisi,ITALY), Ecole Privée La Chapelle Janson (La Chapelle Janson,FRANCE), , C.P. Santa Catlina (El Pinos,SPAIN),Zubeyde Hanım Ucler Ilkokulu (Amasya,TURKEY).We studied with the students aged between 8-12 throughout the project as the primary schools.We defined the following main objectives for our project: -During the 24 months of our project,more than 600 students were involved in common,interactive and attractive project activities using modern ICT tools in formal/informal contexts, in cooperation with 40 teachers.3000 participants were involved to our project indirectly. -Learning about the properties of four seasons,their effects to our lifestyles,observing the changes of 'Flora' in the nature step by step in different parts of Europe. - Observing biological and endemic diversity and their extensions and making people aware of the importance of them. -Gaining environmental consciousness,respect to the nature,learning and acting more for protecting the elements of the nature and having idea about global environmental problems and their solutions. -Teachers strenghtened educational ties with the European partners, getting to understand the school systems better and get common vocabulary while exchanging good practices.-Ensuring a definite participation of the refugee students at the partner schools to adopt them the environment that they live in.We had three transnational meetings at the partner schools;in Greece,in November,2017 (as the kick off meeting),in Spain,in October,2018 (as the intermediary evaluation meeting),in France,in May,2019 (as the final meeting).Four partner schools located in different parts of Europe were assigned to LTT activities because of having advantages,strengths, experiences and good samples about the project subject.The common duration for these LTT activities is 5 days + 2 days for traveling for each country.C1 in Bulgaria (February,2018) and C4 in Italy (March,2019)were short-term joint staff training events for 12 teachers (2 from each country for each activity). C2 in Croatia (May,2018) and C3 in Turkey (December,2019) were short-term exchanges of groups of pupils for 26 students and 12 teachers as accompanying persons for each activity.Learning outside the classroom is not a new teaching methodology but by our project we would like to add more outdoor activities in our curriculum to make learning more enjoyable and permanent.In the first year of the project,we had outdoor activities to observe the nature especially the flora in the four seasons.In the second year of the project,we prepared,presented and perfomed the experiences by the help of the well-designed project activities such as four seasons musical and exhibiton,e-flora album-e-story book about four seasons.We also planned dissemination activities in local,regional,national areas and in Europe for providing expandation of our project by meetings,local press and media,information-communication technologies such as project website. The relationships with the relevant stakeholders also helped us for community awareness. Dissemination locally and globally helped us to improve our friendship. Sharing experiences and knowledge made them enlarge for the benefit of our children and European society. Integrating teaching techniques such as ""learning outside the classrooms"" to our curriculum was an important gain of our project."