Although our students are provided with quite high quality formal education, we often find they are not adequately prepared to handle and solve the challenges of nowadays because the skills relevant to the demands of our society aren‘t often covered by the traditional lessons and classes. Sometimes there is a significant “skills mismatch“ between the competences the students need to succeed for the personal and professional success in the future life and those they actually possess. All the partners of our Project, five schools from Lithuania, Latvia, Turkey, Portugal and Poland, are focused on the growing active and productive members of their communities and providing them with the supportive atmosphere. We, teachers and educators, look for the new attractive teaching methods and techniques which would help us to meet the students‘ needs and build their key skills and competences. The main goal of this project is to provide appropriate opportunities for the students, their families and other community members to experience and practice life skills, to inculcate them into day to day practice so that it can last with them for their life time. The activities of our Project combine improving the life skills with the learning through the Arts. We focus on such arts areas as music, drama, painting and photography asserting that practices in those fields lead and support most interpersonal skills and deal with the conflicts, provide self-confidence and social tolerance, and show positive effects on other processes. Learning through the arts involves children and adults from the different social and cultural backgrounds and creates equal opportunities for all students including those from the disadvantaged groups. We believe that the general effects of such a Project mention a development of cognitive, social and personal competences for all the participants. We‘ll use a wide range of the methods and approaches such as peer and group learning, classes for the students of mixed ages, experimenting, guided, focused and free exploration, modeling, simulation and visualization, role play, discussions, and conferences. Carrying out the activities of the Project we expect to create and prepare the brochures related to the teaching life skills through four fields of our project: music, drawing, painting and crafts, drama and creative dramatics,and photography and video making. They will contain the descriptions of the teaching techniques, lesson plans, practical exercises, scripts and photos of the students’ works. The brochures will be prepared in paper and digital formal and spread among the learning community on local, regional, national and international levels sharing the best practices and experiences. One of the outputs of our project will also be the photo album “The world seen through the children eyes.” containing the social, street and nature photographies taken by the students . We expect that our students will develop a wide range of leadership skills. The students will improve the skills and abilities to work well with others and step forward to lead with the new ideas and initiatives. In a long time perspective our students will take on big issues and address them in a meaningful way that will have an impact on the world outside the classroom. The students as well as other participants will develop healthy work habits of doing the job in time, respecting the contribution of others and putting the efforts into the success of the final piece. Because most arts disciplines are collaborative in nature , the participants practice working together, sharing responsibilities and compromising with others to accomplish a common goal. The students will learn that a constructive feedback is a part of learning and it isn‘t anything to be offended by or to be taken personally. The evaluation is incorporated in every step of the process in the learning through the arts ensuring that critique is a valuable experience and greatly contributes to the success of the final piece.We believe that our Project matches the real needs of the teaching staff as well as needs of the students and other educators on local, national and international levels, and its results and outputs such as practical guidelines for the workshops and trainings, teaching techniques, lesson plans, descriptions of the exercises to teach and learn life skills through the arts, will be used and exploited continuously after the end of the Project.

We started this project, inspired by the importance of reaching equality-base education for all students. It is imperative recognizing that different students need different resources to achieve the same goals as their peers. All Students, regardless their personal or social background, have the same rights in reaching their educational potential. Partner schools aim to develop an equitable and balanced education system that helps all students to develop the knowledge and skills they need to become productive citizens in society. Rooted in significance by using legends in education, we will focus on the effects of legends on student's behaviours and attitudes towards moral values; exploring other countries lives through legends and we will meet common values. Legends are traditional stories told about a particular place or person, and can include elements of folklore, mythology or explanations for natural occurrences. Through the use of legends as educational tools, students will interpret social and natural events in different ways and develop themselves in emotional and social areas. Among the biggest problems faced by societies today is the crisis of value conflict and moral breakdown. The need for value education has increased. All kinds of feelings, thoughts and rules that are adopted and kept alive in a society constitute the values. Legends have a functional feature in the transfer of our cultural knowledge and values. We will use culture as a key component in international relations, to increase understanding, socialisation, awareness and international cooperation in the field of education, bringing together students and teachers from different geographies and cultures under the aegis of the European Union. The project aims to develop students' horizons about creative thinking and new approaches, using the legends and traditions that society has lived for many years and the music and dances that have emerged from them. We educators have the added responsibility of spreading and guaranteeing its dissemination/preservation.Another aim of this project is to develop positive moral values in students and to protect them from bad habits and addictions, making them more knowledgeable and respectful of their own roots and those of the other partner countries involved. We are a partnership of 6 countries that aim to address European priorities and meet the needs of our schools as some gaps have been observed: poor knowledge of Europe and key competences such as low level of moral values and disenchantment of pupils due to the fact that some schools are located in less favoured regions and far away from big cities.It is also crucial for us to spread and develop the theme Legends and Traditions, as well as all the resources and materials produced throughout this partnership, in the curriculum of our schools and to encourage our colleagues to improve their knowledge and diversify strategies, incorporating global and cross-cutting themes in their classes and keeping all the material produced active and useful. We believe that the schools’ curricular principles should reflect values, pedagogical contexts and their needs. For this, they need good quality resources, in terms of human resources, practical equipment, environments and pedagogical resources.Through this project, participating teachers will increase their confidence, develop their language skills, establish international connections, learn about different school systems and cultures. In this way, they will improve their skills and continually increase their knowledge and experience in embodying global and traditional themes in their teaching practices. We will also open up students' horizons as well as their focus on the importance of their learning process and the purpose of it. The educational quality of our schools will also grow and schools will be internationally recognized and will be preferred by students. Enjoyment, respect and tolerance will be created among participants from different cultures and cultural bridges will be built through different cultural activities.The project is addressed to 11 to 14 Ss, including Ss at social risk. Each school will be responsible for coordinating the project, organizing different activities to be carried out for the implementation of the project. In the 2 short-term staff trainings in Slovenia and in Portugal, all the participants will understand the purpose, operation and implementation of the project, and learn how to use eTwinning and TwinSpace effectively as well as other ICT tools. After 5 short-term exchange of student activities in The Republic of Macedonia, Poland, Turkey, Slovenia and Italy, all the participants will get information about other country's legends, cuisine, history, values, traditions, folklore via presentations, workshops and study visits to areas that have legend legacies. In the future, we want to provide guidance to other schools on local and transnational projects.