Friday 28 December 2018

Short-term Exchange of Students to Barcelos (Portugal)

During the students' first mobility to  Barcelos, our Portuguese hosts showed the rest of participants the most outstanding features of its cultural heritage through visits and workshops.  Special focus was put on the smell and taste senses, and were directly related to the final tasks carried out during the stay.

Tasks completed  before the mobility:
- Recipes (taste and smell). During the “Join staff training event” held in October in Portugal,  partners had discussed and agreed on 3 recipes typical from their cuisine which included a starter, a main course and a dessert. They also decided which recipes were going to be cooked during the the mobility in Portugal:  Greece: salad + “Dakos”, Poland: vegetable salad “SAŁATKA JARZYNOWA”, Spain: a dessert “Roques de de xocolata”, Portugal: main course “Feijoada e arroz seco”. Afterwards, each partner wrote the recipes in English and in its national language, cooked the dish at home and took photos of the whole process.

- Glossary in Progress (hearing sense). During the “Join staff training event” partners also agreed on the set of expressions useful for the short-term exchanges  taking into account the suggestions made by their students prior the meeting as a contribution to the glossary. The objective is to progressively fill in a chart in the languages of the partner schools. The hosting partner uploaded a video to the project Youtube channel  to show how these expressions are pronounced and written in Portuguese. The board game: Sense your city (all senses). The Portuguese partner created 20 questions dealing with different aspects related to its area and heritage.

Activities carried out during the mobility:
Day 1: Participants got to know each other, introduced themselves and their schools.  They were given a tour around the school.  Later, each delegation presented its two candidate logos and voted to choose the final project logo. One of Greece's designs was the winner.
The Portuguese hosting partner presented 20 questions about different aspects related to what their guest partners would discover during those days. Finally, there was a sightseeing tour around Barcelos.


Day 1 P 

Day 2: Students travelled to Porto, where they could visit one of the many famous Porto wine cellars. There they were explained about the production of this popular wine and even experienced a 3D tour across Porto vineyards.


Day 2 P 

Day 3: Visit to the local shops to buy the necessary ingredients for the recipes.  Glossary in Action Part 1: Polish, Greek and Spanish students recorded speaking expressions of the glossary in Portuguese.  Visit to Braga (streets, Monasterio Bom Jesus, where we observed the different monuments and landscapes related to the five senses).


Day 3 P 


Day 4:  First, participants visited the impressive local market, where they could admire the work of  traditional handcrafters but also shop for the groceries required for the cooking workshop on Thursday. Then, they joined at school to take part in a workshop to create a calendar and a digital recipe book with all the recipes they had prepared at home.


Day 4 P 

Day 5: Sense your city: The Game Part 1. On the last day there was a competition among partners which consisted in answering those first 20 questions dealing with the information they had been provided during that week. The workshop also included the making of cards to contain those questions and guest participants having to come up with more questions.
Afterwards, students participated in a cooking session in which each delegation cooked one of the recipes at the school kitchen using the ingredients they had shopped for or even brought with them from their countries. Thus, that evening's dinner menu consisted of all those traditional dishes from the Polish, Portuguese, Greek and Spanish cuisines.
To conclude, all participants had to evaluate the mobility through an online questionnaire.

Day 5 P

Monday 12 November 2018

We have a logo!

Once the project had started , the four partner teams had introduced one each other and the first activities had taken place, it was high time to confer our project a visual identity. Therefore, an strategy was developed to choose a logo from the candidates

The designs had to fulfil the following requirements:

  • depict the spirit of the project
  • be adaptable to any form of dissemination (paper, cards, posters, email, website, social networking...).
  • reflect the nature and themes of the project and must include the following motto: "Sense Your City".
  • be entirely original, not breach any copyrights, and not previously published.
Each partner school ran their own competition in order to select TWO finalists. Participants had to  submit both a copy in color and in black-and-white using DIN-A4 or folio format.


During the first short-term exchange of pupils in Barcelos (Portugal), which took place in December 2018, each team presented and explained its two logos to the rest of the schools’ representatives. Afterwards, each delegation casted 3 votes, one each for the three logos they think are the best, in order of preference (i.e., 3 points for 1st-best, 2 points for 2nd-best, and 1 point for 3rd best). Teams could not vote for logos from their own school.


In the end, the winning logo was one of the candidate designs proposed by the Greek partners. It was chosen by the Portuguese, Polish and Spanish participants for depicting the notion of discovering  Europe and especially the countries included in this partnership through the human senses at a glance. As soon as the winning logo was chosen, it started being used in all products.


Monday 5 November 2018

Initial Evaluation of our Pupils' Previous Knowledge

In order to evaluate the previous knowledge of participant students  at the very beginning of the project, we decided to ask them a very simple question: What do you know about the cultural heritage of the other partner cities

Padlet has been the tool used to find out what students at all four partner schools knew about each other's city. Results are showing that, as expected, they do not really know much about Gdynia, Agios Nikolaos, Barcelos or Tarragona. This is actually highly motivating for there is a lot to do but we are sure that in two years time, our pupils will have increased their knowledge about other places in Europe and their splendid cultural heritage thanks to the cooperation and exchanges foreseen in this project.






Sunday 14 October 2018

Short-term Joint Training Event for Project Coordinators


From October 10th to 12th the team leaders of the four schools involved in the project "Sense Your City, Taste Its Sights" met for the first time in Barcelos, Portugal. There they got  a training on how to use new technologies to implement, monitor, evaluate and disseminate the project and its impact on our communities.




This training also gave partners an opportunity to discuss about project deatils and plan ahead activities.  It was definetely fantastic experience after which we all were looking forward to going back to our schools to get started!