Natural Born Teachers project has officially started its journey dedicated to promoting Teachers’ and students’ wellness and school success thanks to the experimentation and integration of Mindfulness and Nature-based activities in school life.
This Erasmus+project represents a Small scale cooperation partnership in the School education sector and combines the efforts of 3 partners from Italy, Estonia and Portugal, aiming at promoting innovative and holistic approaches to teaching and learning, fostering opportunities of professional development and exchange of best practices among teachers and other education professionals.
JUMP Association is the leading organization and has reunited together two partners schools with the same needs and objectives, Agrupamento de Escolas Elias Garcia from Sobreda, Portugal, and Tallinn Männi kindergarten from Tallin, Estonia.
During the spring of 2023 team leaders started their online meetings to coordinate the start of activities, agree about the first steps and schedule the mobility and implementation plan.
Later on, on 26 and 27/05/2023 – thanks to a prep visit – JUMP hosted Francisca Soares and Maria Teresa Pita Vieira, representing the Portuguese partner school.
I was a short but effective time together discovering the headquarters of JUMP and two of the local schools cooperating with the leader and the area of Soverato.
After the first series of meetings online this has been an important occasion for 2 of the 3 partners to meet in person, understand better the project, go deeper into common needs and objectives and plan future actions to achieve them.
The first Learning Teaching Training mobility (LTT) wil be on 22-27 October 2023, hosted in Sobreda by the portuguese partner school.
The focus will be “Nature based education and Eco-schooling, with the experimentation and added value of the contamination of Mindfulness activities”.
It will be a very intense and enriching week for the participating teachers, 6 from each country, exhanging experiences, learning from each other and from local experts. The sessions will be facilitated also by a JUMP trainer, Alessia Simonetti, cooperating with the hosting school in the training planning, as requested by the partners since the phase of project design.
She will travel from Italy together with the Italian delegation, composed by 6 teachers from the I.C. Montepaone, associated partner school with whom Jump has already a fruitful cooperation going on, both in Calabria region and for EU projects.
Besides the preparatory meeting held with the Italian teachers in presence last September, on 12th October JUMP gathered them online for a pre departure breafing. After revising the programme, checking the last details, and sharing comments and questions… we are ready and looking forward to finally meeting the other participants from Estonia and Portugal live!
More updates will comee very soon, so keep on following our path of experimentation and inner and outer journeys.
Author: Alessia Simonetti – JUMP Team