Funded by the Erasmus+
Programme of the
European Union
You are now reading the first of five newsletters for the WELCOME project (WE Learn and COMmunicate Ensemble), which runs under the coordination of the Nakladatelství Dr. Josef Raabe s.r.o. publishing house. It is an international European Erasmus+ project that falls within Key Action 2 (KA2). The participating countries are the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Bulgaria. Our project partners are Charles University in Prague, Research Institute of Child Psychology and Patopsychology in Bratislava, Institute for Psychological Health and Development in Sofia, and the Bratislava-based agency M7, which provides services in the area of graphic design and programming. Kindergartens and elementary schools in each of the participating countries take part in the testing of the project outputs: Mikoláš Aleš Elementary School, and Kindergarten in Mirotice (Czech Republic), Kindergarten and Elementary School Zubrohlava (Slovakia), and ODZ 72 Prikazka bez krai in Sofia (Bulgaria).
The main objective of the WELCOME project is to provide all children with a good start thanks to high-quality pre-school education. We would like to help kindergarten teachers lead and manage a heterogenous group that often includes children with specific needs: socially disadvantaged children, special needs children including gifted children, or children who will soon be diagnosed with a learning disorder. We are convinced that the integration of these children is possible if the teacher takes an individual approach to them, and provides them with help according to their specific needs. We would like to help teachers make this happen as much as we can.
The priority of the WELCOME project is to support inclusion in kindergartens, and to help children with a social or health handicap through actively integrating them to the child group at kindergarten. What we consider to be of the same importance is to help teachers understand inclusion thanks to the provision of theoretical background, and practical suggestions based on functional models from a variety of countries.
The first output of the project will be a methodological guidebook for kindergarten teachers who are looking for new procedures for managing a class that is heterogenous in terms of special education needs. Apart from a theoretical introduction that will deal with special education needs, the guidebook will contain a more extensive methodological part, which will offer for the individual areas of the child’s development worksheets, suggestions for activities aimed at a heterogenous group, examples of good practice, and recommendations from specialized institutions or sources of information.
The second output will be an application for smart devices (tablets, phones, as well as interactive boards), which – apart from the electronic version of the Methodological Guidebook – contains a set of interactive education apps that deal with the areas of development contained in the Methodological Guidebook.
The last output will then be an integrated manual for teachers on how to organize and manage workshops for children with special education needs, and for teachers who work with such children. This manual will be subjected to practical testing at pilot workshops in each country in order to ensure that it meets the requirements for the management of workshops.
We launched the project website (http://e-welcome.eu/), which is available in four language versions. The website contains – apart from the description of the project and its outputs – also information about the individual project partners. We are also active on social networks, so you can follow or like us on https://www.facebook.com/erasmus.welcome/, where we upload photographs related to our project. The site also contains information about our first project meeting, which was held in Prague. During this two-day session, the individual project partners got the opportunity to introduce themselves, and working together we created the basis for the concepts of the project outputs, which are currently being prepared by the selected partner organizations.
The structure of the Methodological Guidebook has already been drawn up and commented upon – the same applies for the structure of the interactive application. Our partners from Charles University in Prague, Research Institute for Child Psychology and Patopsychology, and from the Institute for Psychological Health and Development in Sofia are now writing the individual chapters of the Methodological Guidebook, and the preparation of the interactive application for smart devices should be starting soon under the management of the agency M7.
After the Methodological Guidebook has been submitted for editing, all WELCOME project partners will receive the publication for commentary. In August, we will meet for an international project session in Bratislava, where we will be introduced to the appearance of the application, and one of the activities contained in it will be presented to us. After all comments and changes have been incorporated, the testing of the Methodological Application in partner kindergartens will start in the Fall of 2017.
If you find the WELCOME project interesting, you can read more about it on our website, or you can visit our Facebook page. We will be happy if you register on our project website, and if you share this newsletter and the information contained in it with your colleagues. If you have questions that have not been answered anywhere, you can contact our Project Manager Jana Šámalová on j.samalova@raabe.cz. Thank you for your time!
© 2016 Nakladatelství Dr. Josef Raabe, s.r.o.
