Background: Emotional and social skills play an important role in building one's self-awareness, sef-esteem and identity. Pupils with special needs tend to have challenges particularly in these areas, as well as in the area of reading and writing skills, which can increase their risk to drift to social exclusion. Hereby, this project would work preventively when it comes to the risk of marginalization of the pupils with special needs. Project objectives: To promote reading skills and more importantly the habit of reading as it seems to be disappearing amongst children and youth. To get to know other countries’ national stories (folk stories, national epics) and find similarities in them. To recognize and name emotions, first by finding the feelings in the stories and then gradually (depending on the students’ abilities) in their own lives. To enable students to practise and value collective working both in their own schools and wider communities and through international partnership and by this promote the sense of equality. To increase both the students’ and the staffs’ language and ICT skills and the use of technology and various teaching approaches. Participants: Kajaanintullin koulu - Sairaalakoulun yksikkö (Oulu Hospital School) is a special education school that provides education for the compulsory education aged children who are treated in the Oulu University Hospital for both somatic and/or psychiatric causes. Pupils come from a large geographical area in Northern Finland. ZKPiG No 32 in Gdansk is a school at mental hospital and provides education, therapy and other activities for children, teenagers and young adults suffering from different mental diseases. Hayriye-Kemal KUSUN Özel Eğitim Uygulama Okulu ve İş Uygulama Okulu is a school for mentally handicapped children. School focuses on trying to make the pupils self sufficient and teach them simple academic abilities. Scoala Gimnaziala Speciala nr. 10, Bucuresti is a special education school for mentally disordered (some of them autistic and L-Down) children. School collaborates with regular schools through specialists that offer support for integrated SEN students. In our partnership we want our pupils to be able to communicate with other pupils and realize their own feelings as a result of this project. We will compare teaching methods and improve our ways by working together to exchange experience, learn and create a new methodology and build new tools to work more effectively with our pupils. Activities and methods: Pupils will collaborate in each school to work with the stories – each partner school will choose a story from their national literature and translate it into English. Pupils will work with the stories using different methods and approaches: e.g. making theatre of one story, illustrating another and so on according to their abilities and school possibilities. The working process is documented and shared with partner schools via e-mail and website. Along the working process pupils will be working with the themes of emotions and equality. All work will be adapted to the pupils' age and abilities. Experiential approach will be used throughout the activities. Staff training events will be organized for learning new methods and approaches, this is done by working with the pupils. Results and impact: At the end of the project the documentation of the working process will be collected to make a book of all the stories and a DVD showcasing the project work, as well as the guidebook of the methods used in the project. Pupils are expected to increase positive attitudes towards learning in general and especially towards reading, as well as to learn recognising and naming of the emotions, this hoping to benefit the emotional resilience. Longer term benefits: Exchanging ideas and experiences with European colleagues and finding out the differences as well as the similarities in different countries' schooling systems will broaden our perspective and help develop our teaching skills. The aim is to create better possibilities for disadvantaged children and youth to gain greater sense of belonging into European cultural heritage and its multicultural community. Pupils in hospital and special schools will feel less isolated through finding out that there are pupils with similar problems also in other countries. They can also share potential solutions to their problems when exchanging experiences with each other and this will have positive effects on their self-esteem. There is no better way to exchange ideas and experiences on teaching than actually meeting colleagues face to face. Thus it is of great importance to have possibilities to visit and work with each other in their schools and by this improve teachers' confidence about working together across languages and cultures. This also gives the teachers better possibilities in developing a greater sense of belonging into European teachers community.