Save Our Blue Planet

The main idea of the project was to raise awareness of the main environmental issues and call for action to protect nature so people could have healthy, happy and sustainable lives. Although most of the participants had general knowledge of the environmental dangers and claimed to be eco-friendly, we felt the lack of actions held at homes and in hometowns and we wanted to change the passive attitude into the active approach and to learn from each other their steps, what they have done and we can make students be environmentally active. To be more active means that we need to be more aware. At schools we saw the need to broaden the environmental horizons in its interdisciplinary dimensions, at homes to change the family habits concerning eco-friendly behavior, at local society to increase ecological awareness of citizens and their eco activity and at national and international level to show the results and share them and show how we can learn and teach environmental issues.

We wanted to raise students awareness of environmental and climate change challenges, change students behavior towards the consumption habits and lifestyle, to aware them about the environment they live in and to learn how to prevent the environmental problems and what they are, to gain high-level thinking skills, find solutions to environmental problems, improve foreign languages, gain international learning experience, become Europeans, strengthen cultural exchange. What is more, we wanted to work out some teaching /learning material which would be useful in the future when teaching ecology, biology, physics or IT and could be shared on local, national and international level via European Project Results Platform.

We divided the project into three parts, each of them was focused on different activities heading to the ecological behavior, awareness and protection of the environment. The first part was about climate change and global warming. We created a project logo, ran a survey on climate change and global warming awareness at our schools and compared the results and did experiments on global warming and share results. We created posters on main environmental problems and possible solutions when working in international groups. We had a lecture on carbon footprint with a quizz. The second part was about the pollution and the protection of the environment. We ran a survey concerning the main topic of this phase, we made experiments on pollution, organized the international debate on the main topic and learned how important the waste separation is. We visited a local landfill and a separation line. The third part was about 3 Rs. We ran a survey at schools, again we could compare the results. We also did experiments on reducing, reusing and recycling and we shared the results of experiments through presentations and videos. We visited recycling factories and plants and an open air museum on sustainability and protection of the nature.

The involved students and teachers became aware of the measures taken by the EU against global warming, how to prevent global warming, of what various types of pollution are and what main principles of 3Rs are. They got the knowledge, they improved their English as English was the main language of the project. They improved their ICT competences, made videos and presentations, they improved their citizenship quality and social inclusion, the students were from various social backgrounds, they gained self-confidence, they got the knowledge of the importance of the protection of the environment, their cultural heritage, what is more, the students from various religious backgrounds met and had to learn to respect and not to have prejudice. We worked out various methods of teaching through experiments, made presentations and shared them, we learned to discuss on them and to express our opinion. We learned to look for the information, to work in international groups, to defend our ideas and respect the opinions of the others thanks to the international debate. The conrete results have been uploaded at Beneficiary Project Results Platform and some of them on Twinspace which doesn´t work now and we couldn´t continue.