Our adventure with Erasmus+

Time in Germany

In the following summary you will learn about our experiences at our school in Germany.

At the beginning of our project, there were many challenges that we overcame as a team, together with our partners from Poland and Italy. Our goal was clear: a workbook on climate change for younger students, both with and without special needs. But how do you build something so exciting that someone will have fun with it? How do you formulate the texts and tasks in an understandable way so that children aged 11-13 are not overwhelmed? These were just a few of the challenges we faced.

Another and for us even bigger challenge was the communication with the partner schools, because we all had different schedules. Because besides the 3 real meetings with all partner schools, we had another one: all participants had been divided into small international teams (ITs), with 2 students from each country. These ITs were supposed to meet at regular intervals via videoconference and keep each other informed about the progress in the respective countries. This info was then shared within the national teams and so everyone was always up to date. At least that was the theory. In many cases it worked very well, but there were also some total failures here and there.

In addition, Corona still had his hand in the game and threw stones in our way here and there. At our school we were very lucky that the Erasmus+ lesson was a fixed part of our timetable and so we met every Wednesday from 9:08 to 10:20 in our national team.

In the first hours we approached the topic and gathered what we already knew about it. Quickly the complexity of the whole thing became apparent and so we started to cluster and structure the topic.

We were divided into groups of 2 or 3 and each group could choose their work topic or was assigned to a specific section that had to be completed by a certain deadline. Everyone was very excited about the work ahead, as none of us had had the opportunity to work on such a large and important project before. Of course, we had minor difficulties at the beginning, because such work requires a lot of organization and motivation. But we can safely say that each group gave their best.

The whole project lasted 2 years. We started in the 11th grade and finished it at the end of the 12th grade. That's a long period of time and especially in times of exams the motivation fell a bit victim. But there was always someone there to motivate us again and encourage us to continue.

For me, I can say that I really enjoyed the project and I am really grateful that I had the opportunity to be a proud member of the Erasmus+ project. I really enjoyed working with a team full of very nice, grateful and fun students and of course our teachers who made the whole project possible in the first place. The project required a lot of teamwork and discipline, but also motivation and skills. In my opinion, as a team we can be very proud of our result, the activity book.

Time in Poland

How was our time in Poland, you may ask? Well, let's tell some of it in the following summary.

Our departure was on September 26, 2021, which funnily enough involved some chaos for us. First of all, we all had to somehow get to the Düsseldorf airport and find the rest of the members before our plane took off.

Once we arrived in Warsaw, a small transit bus was waiting for us to take us to Gostynin where our host families were waiting for us. Each of us was picked up and given a chance to settle in with his/her host family and get acquainted with each family member. In addition, many of us went for walks or drove around the city with our host family to get to know them a bit.

In the following days, we had a rather short school day of about 4 to 6 hours, during which we all worked together on our activity book. Unfortunately, our partners from Italy were not allowed to come because of the pandemic, but they were always connected to us via teams during the work processes at the school. So we were able to exchange materials and evaluate, improve or discard them.

After work, we usually met with most of the entire group and spent a lot of time together. This way we got to know each other and the new culture better. Sometimes we also continued to work on our project or just took a little trip to the next bigger city.

But what we liked the most was our big trip to Gdansk, followed by an overnight stay in Sopot. The visit to the Orlov cliff rounded off this longer excursion. For us, this was pretty much the highlight of the entire trip, next to our last day in Poland.

On our last day, the Polish team surprised us with a campfire where we all met for the last time and just had a lot of fun telling each other our life stories, making jokes or singing together.

Enjoy the video about our stay in Gostynin, Poland.