DOING SMALL THINGS WITH GREAT LOVE

“Doing Small Things with Great Love” involves the participation of four partners: Greece, Italy, Croatia and Spain and embraces a total amount of 400 students aged between 9-12 years old. The four schools count with a significant number of students with learning difficulties due to diverse reasons, so in order to avoid the decrease of students’ self-esteem and motivation through “Doing Small Things with Great Love” we want to re-orientate the approaches towards the processes of teaching and learning and diversify the methods used. We are determined to explore alternative ways of working in order to foster social inclusion and supporting our students in acquiring and developing basic skills and key competences needed in our society. Our goal is to promote a sense of responsibility among students of their own education while increasing self-motivation and help them build their learner autonomy. We will work in social and educational values of European cultural heritage, and we will promote social cohesion among our communities and European partners. With this project we want our schools' communities realize that by doing small solidary actions in our towns we can contribute to make the world a better place. Sharing and implementing these small actions with our partners during the 4 international mobilities done with students and teachers will give our schools’ community participants the chance to live an unforgettable experience while contributing their solidary grain of sand around Europe, so the impact will be greater by causing the snowball effect. The four areas of solidarity we cover are: -Solidarity with disadvantaged groups with activities such as the knitting of scarves for the refugees in the Island of Lesbos or the solidary Running Race hand in hand with Save the Children NGO; -Solidarity with the environment by doing a Cleaning forest/beach/park day or Plant a tree day; -Solidarity with minority cultures by discovering the most emblematic buildings and recreating them out of recycled materials or by organizing cultural shows where local associations in spreading our cultural heritage is sought;-Solidarity with integral health by collecting Origami cranes that contribute to the research diseases among children or the organization of Solidary markets to gather donations later offered to the Caring Clowns associations. The concrete results we want to produce are to provide our students and teachers the possibility to participate in a mobility and contribute through solidary actions to the well-being of our partners. We must emphasize that most of our students have never gone abroad, so the simple fact of travelling will be the most relevant impact and benefit that participants will be exposed at. It will be a heart-touching experience that it can hardly be forgotten because we do not always have the opportunity to live with a family from another country, make new friends, and live an unforgettable adventure. We are offering the chance to open up the doors to make a better Europe through the inclusion of the whole community. Innovative methodologies will be applied to support the development of our participants’ skills and key competences as well as social inclusion. We will work on learning to learn, social and civic competence and competence on autonomy as the project pursue the development of attitudes such as cooperation, solidarity, altruism, culture respect, personal responsibility, among others. The linguistic, digital, artistic and cultural and the interaction with the physical word competence will not step aside, so that our main horizontal priority may be fulfilled successfully. As a result, we expect an increase of the students' participation and inclusion in school activities, an expansion of the use of ICT tools such as the Twinspace platform, the promotion of gamification resources to make the activities more attractive and the diversification and implementation of new methodologies such as Project Based Learning. Finally, we have designed a dissemination plan to implement before, during and after the project considering our School's documents. With this plan we will publish the results, benefits and opportunities obtained; show the process and share the experiences and activities done by our school communities; make visible the support offered and the donations given; and ensure the achievement of our project’s goals.