SUMMARY OF OUR PROJECT

Nowadays children live mostly in the imprisonment of their home and school walls. Several reasons have pushed children indoors, including technology, migration to cities and their development, demands on children’s time (homework, parental fear of strangers…). In these times of indoor children, personal connections with nature seem hard to attain, an aspect which is related to a decrease on the environment care on the part of future generations Increasing proofs demonstrate many benefits of nature on children’s physical and psychological well being, such as reduction of stress, better physical health, more creativity and a better focus on their tasks. Furthermore, an increase of leisure time on greener areas might enable children to learn more successfully, improving their ability to concentrate in the classroom. Exploring creatively and self-experiences discovering nature seem to be the best way for children to learn about a lot of subjects, mainly Science, according to recent research. Taking into account these study results and based on our needs to find different activities which allow students to perform better in class, we have created this project aiming to get the desired results and sharing them with other schools from our areas and all around Europe. We have decided to make this initiative transnational with the purpose to observe how other pupils relate to nature, how other schools challenge the issue of children spending so much time on indoors activities. We want to share good practices and knowledges which will help in the improvement of all the involved schools.
Our main aims are:
1. To improve the competence of teachers designing outdoors activities integrating them in a systematic practice.
 2. To enable teachers within the EU countries to cooperate and to produce common outputs that will be used by their schools as well as by other schools.
3. To promote nature as a learning setting.
4. To improve the acquisition of skills and competencies by pupils.
5. To make parents aware of the importance of outdoor time.
6. To develop teachers and pupils’ critical thinking and intercultural competence.
7. To develop interpersonal skills among the participants.