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“Manual skills in 3.0 web age “, a heavy title for a meaningful three-year project.From September 2016 to August 2019 IC of Castelcovati led the following primary schools: 4o DIMOTIKO SCHOLIO of Edessa (Greece), Moorfield Primary school of Widnes (England), Agrupamento de Escolas Soares of Braga (Portugal) and Szkola Podstawowa of Pazskowka (Poland), in a project that proposed laboratory paths with the aim of underlining the connection between cognitive development and manual skills through the creation of artifacts, from the simplest to the most complex, in an increasingly digital age.The needs analysis carried out in the involved schools has indeed brought to light the necessity to recover various manual skills, essential to achieve effective personal, social and future professional autonomy. An increasingly evident difficulty in the resolution of simple problems or daily and concrete troubles has in fact been noted in the studentsOn the other hand, nowadays there is instead an innate predisposition to the digital field that in many cases allows a faster analysis and a theoretical solution of problematic situations.We then entered an experimental path, both for teachers and pupils, promoting situations to be faced with the help of digital technological tools to develop and use the key and life competences, in which the experience becomes value and sharing and the manual skills become a cognitive process.The recovery of simple tools and technologies has effectively turned into a powerful inclusive communication channel, where hands and other sensory organs have replaced words and allowed many foreign students to actively and enthusiastically participate in the learning proposals.During these three years the students of our schools have chosen different types of activities in which they have been designers and creators of various kinds of artifacts in artistic, scientific, musical, historical, technological, and theatrical field, in sewing, recycling, disassembly, bicycle repairing and folder bag making.The students were the real protagonists of concrete operative proposals based on problem solving, whose aim was not the product but the path designed and carried out by using innovative methodological techniques, already known but not often used.We are talking about the Cooperative Learning with objective and defined criteria, according to which pupils work in small teams with assigned tasks and for which they are responsible; we are talking about upside-down classes, in which the students personally build knowledge and skills in an active way; we are also referring to educational methods such as the Brainstorming, used to start any operative proposal in order to probe and share knowledge and content; and last but not least CLIL, the acronym of Content and Language Integrated Learning, a methodology that makes use of the English language to teach different school subjects, which allows both the acquisition of disciplinary contents and the learning of the foreign language.For our project the English language also played the role of the vehicular language through which pupils and teachers entered into communication. Needless to say, the more one is exposed to the use of a different language, the more it becomes less unknown and distant.For teachers also, in recent years we have seen an increase in the knowledge of English, thanks to conversation courses and CLIL methodology courses held by native British speakers.All the carried out activities have been planned, shared and proposed in the five partner schools, diversifying according to the needs of the students themselves. At the beginning of each school year, project meetings were organized among teachers from all the five countries in turn in the various school locations, in order to plan annual courses; in the same way in the spring months the short-term mobilities took place to allow the meeting of small representatives of pupils.These were special occasions for the students, certainly not trips for tourists, but intense, tiring days, during which they had the chance to live next to new European friends, attending their schools, staying by their families and showing their own creations, as well as the route taken and the skills acquired.During the last year the schools created together a unique multi-language and multiple-hands theatrical artifact, complete with scenographies, music, dances, costumes, staged in Italy during the last short-term exchange of the students.Particular attention was paid to the inclusion of foreign students in the project, both in school activities and in the selection for mobility.In each partner country the involvement of the many local associations, parents and administrations was essential.
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