Recently the Erasmus+ K2 project “Quality vs. Quantity” ended, where I, Guste Ciunyte, participated as activities coordinator, organisator and implementator. I bravely took initiative because those experiences are very unique and useful for broadening our horizons and making new partnerships. Also, I was keen to join the project because the implementation of the activities were to happen in my “Saule” middle school. During all the duration of the project I received help from VDU creative industry students Gintare Liubinaite.
So, what was the project? Main topic of Erasmus+ K2 project “Quality vs. Quantity” was the promotion of a healthy lifestyle. During the implementation of the activities of this project, questions were raised about the physical and mental harmony of young people, healthy development, factors determining quality growth and maturation. After all, the basic fundamental values of a harmonious life are physical, spiritual, emotional and social development. All of these factors are critical to raising young people’s awareness of practicing a healthy lifestyle and its principles. The idea of this project is important – so it even had several social partners from foreign countries – the main partner of our project is Baltic Regional fund Latvia, two more partners are Inovatyvi karta from Lithuania and Wise Veer from Estonia.
In this project, we aimed to help participants understand the basic principles of the concept of a healthy lifestyle and how they affect young people’s lives, increase their understanding of healthy lifestyles and invite them to think healthier and think more about their personal health – adolescence is a time of becoming very conscious and we must realize that we are gradually becoming responsible for our own health and well-being, we are learning to know our body more closely.
In order to achieve the goals of the project, I, together with the project team, had to initiate various meetings, perform various events (flash mobs, presentations, competitions, meetings with experts, visited schools, one of them – “Saulės” middle school, youth I also had to take part in training seminars on a balanced healthy lifestyle, which were implemented with the help of non-formal education methods “learning to learn”, “learning to be”, “learning to be with others”, “learning by doing”. I enjoyed practical meetings at “Saulė” middle school with 8a grade students, which were also attended by the project curator Gintarė – we had such three meetings in total and we did a lot in them: in an informal environment we could get to know each other even better, name our personal qualities we revealed our strengths and weaknesses, talked in one meeting and shared our impressions about people in comfort zones, its expansion possibilities – this became especially important for us before writing Standardized Tests! Well, at the beginning of the summer we implemented another interesting event – QLife – together with classmates and Gintare, working in groups in the city, we searched for treasures: we had to walk a long distance, test our orientation and strengthen my personal qualities – patience and perseverance. Such activities were not only beneficial for physical health, during the meeting we hid our treasure, which is already on the map of Geocaching. That was the final event of our class.
So for me, the project became a great opportunity to learn and understand more about myself, to improve, to learn a little differently than usual. My knowledge of English also improved during the project, as we communicated and shared our impressions in English in meetings with partners from other countries. Well, at our last meeting in Estonia, Vilijandi, two more classmates went with me – Daira Bagdanavičiūtė and Gabija Dadasovaitė.
The project was funded by the Erasmus + program “Quality vs. Quantity ”, in which the Innovative Generation participated together with partners from the Latvian Baltic Regional Foundation and Estonian Wise Veer 🙂