Visibility of eTwinning Projects Groups July 2019 Newsletter Newsletter 9 | Page 105

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2019 Newsletter ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ because they are in a position to explore, learn on their own, using new and concrete, active- participatory methods that motivate them to work and engage in activities. Through games and experiments and the application of acquired knowledge, pre-school children found new ways to keep the environment clean and healthy. The activities of this project involved searching for information on four main topics such as Earth, Air, Water and Fire by using different sources like Google Earth, models with the solar system, using books, encyclopaedias, atlases, or visiting astronomic observatories, museums, aquariums, field trips to scientific institutions, libraries, interactive exhibitions, participating in workshops and / or discussing directly with specialists. In order to help the children in their new learning paths the science centres in each pre-school groups have been enriched with materials needed to carry out experiments: graded containers of different sizes, tubes, pipettes, magnifiers, tripods, hourglasses, magnets etc. After finding information about a specific theme, each kindergarten conducted a number of 3 scientific experiments of different difficulty level: easy, medium, advanced and reunited them in a common project book. The children, helped by the project mascot, a little robot called Hooke, also created stories about each theme and illustrated stories sent by the children in the other kindergartens. For each theme the children could also play digital puzzles and games specially created for them. So, at almost the end of the project, we can proudly present the final products of the children’s and teachers’ work: 4 books of experiments designed and published with detailed instructions and photos, 28 stories about the elements created and illustrated by children and published together in 4 e-books, 90 interactive digital puzzles and games created and played with pre-schoolers. Working on these themes allowed participating children to discover various scientific processes. These child-centred, problem-solving based lessons proved the essential of teaching and learning Science for our children and teachers. Other activities were carried out in parallel with the learning themes: celebration of environment elements like Earth Day, World Water Day, World day of the Sun, Forest Day, World Environment Day, World meteorology day, environmental workshops but also developed specific activities for Europe Day, ErasmusDays and Internet Safety Day. Our project enabled additional value when it increased key digital and technical competence of staff and children, as well as insights related to the key competences of cultural and intercultural awareness. In order to achieve the project’s pedagogical objectives, we used many ICT tools and now the teachers in partner kindergartens are more confident and willing to embrace the new technologies in their classrooms (the amount of ICT used during project life cycle – 35 web 2.0 tools). 105