The BE-CHILD project’s Kick-Off meeting took place in Prague on the 8th and 9th of January 2020, where all eight project partners gathered for a first face-to-face meeting in the beautiful city of Prague. Representatives of organizations from Iceland, Italy, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria and Czechia had a chance to get to know each other, discuss the plan of project implementation, and learn about Czech culture. The meeting hosted and reunited sixteen participants from partner organizations was an official launch of the BE-CHILD Project.
During the two-day meeting, hosted in a marvelous, historically rich part of Prague- Vinohrady, partners shared their views and strategies for the different steps of project implementation. They assessed the project’s activities, including administrative and financial management issues, quality assurance issues, dissemination strategy, budget amendments, and financial reporting procedures.
Furthermore, the partners discussed the development and implementation of ‘Compendium of good practices in teaching socio-emotional competences in early childhood education and care – ECEC (age 0-6)’ (Output 1), which resulted in the action plan for the next months of project implementation.
Also, Output 2 was widely discussed by all the partners, who were very enthusiastic to start working on ‘Educational Toolkit’. This toolkit is a great educational resource supporting children in the development of their main socio-emotional competencies and other relevant skills that should be combined and consolidated through practical activities and exercises in order to gradually encourage and build their balance and autonomy.
In this regard, Project Partners will be working with teachers and other stakeholders to identify and develop learning and playful activities, practical exercises, experimental material and tools, pedagogical video, etc. These activities could become the basis for later success, as well as childhood development in the first six years of life.
It is important to emphasize that all the project participants believe that the project is very relevant in the current situation and will have long-term benefits, such as:
- innovative classroom pedagogical methodologies to create more effective learning settings;
- Introduction of child-centered pedagogical approaches to pre-schools in order to better sustain children’s overall development;
- constructive cooperation between educators, children, parents, and the whole ECEC community is established.
All the project outputs will be incorporated into the project website for future reference and sustainability. In other words, it will be available to everyone from teacher to parent, including those who are interested and would like to incorporate good practice, as well as innovative pedagogical methods into the educational process.
