Vilkaviskio pradine mokykla, Lithuania

Vilkaviskis Primary School is quite a big teaching institution that provides its pupils with pre-primary and primary education, creates community culture and aims at supporting its pupils and preparing them for their successful life. There is one class of a pre-primary level with nine pupils. 449 pupils of 1- 4 classes attend this school. There are 29 pupils with special educational needs. 48 pedagogical workers, including a head teacher, two head teacher’s assistants for educational purposes, one pedagogue of a pre-primary teaching, two social pedagogues, one psychologist, two special pedagogues, two speech-language pathologists, all-day school teachers, two librarians, teachers-assistants and a health-care professional work there.

Vilkaviskis Primary school takes part in a number of local and international projects related to promoting a healthy way of living, developing their leadership and entrepreneurship skills, adapting new educational models etc. The pupils are highly involved in afterschool activities which make cultural skills.

Participating in an international strategic partnerships project for schools would help the school community to discover new ideas, gain new experience and to delve into new countries and cultures. It would also strengthen the community bonds. As the institution has taken part in two Comenius projects and one Erasmus strategic school partnership so far, there is an excellent, hard-working team, ready to cooperate, learn and share the good practices.

Nowadays even primary school pupils are getting deeply dependant upon various innovative smart gadgets, stay at home and less and less time they are spending outdoors. We, educators, find it difficult to engage pupils in any physical activity and that is why we decided to involve them in the international project related to the olympic games. We are completely sure that playing olympics with their European peers will encourage them to do some sports activities, to compete, improve their cooperative and linguistic skills and distract from their electronical appliances. We hope our pupils will enjoy real competitions and all the organisational issues in the international level.

There are two primary school teachers who have the qualification in physical education and five teachers who have been experts in the regional project „Healthy children-gates to the future“. We also have a friendly team of parents who eagerly take part in all activities organized by school community. After a school board meeting, it was decided that the project team will be formed basically on these people who could be responsible for designing , organising and developing the project activities as well as involving children and other school community members in participating in the Olympic ideas based project.