I C U - a toolbox for Optimal Teaching is a sudent and teacher based two year project. Project activities are planned for students from 6 to 12 years with focus on the 6 to 9 year groups. We plan to work with 2153 students and 216 teachers from seven countries (Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Poland, Spain and Sweden). Our demands and expectations towards education have increased and changed within the last decade. We see that the tendency of pupils dropping out of school is getting stronger and stronger and that the world itself is changing. Because of that we need to keep up with the challenges. We strongly believe that in order to stop this tendency we need to make pupils feel connected to education in the way that they see that they can gain their goals from an early stage. This will also increase students will to learn on a higher stages in their education. Teachers work in different classrooms throughout Europe and they all have some good ideas about how to teach better. Our seven schools together can and will do it even better! We have all of us and together identified a need to improve the quality of education in our schools regarding the basic skills. We strongly believe that students only need good teaching methods that suit them to keep up with the others. They need to master the basic skills to make learning more sufficient and to improve the learning process in each child in every level. This procject puts focus upon the five basic skills: oral, writing, ICT, numeracy and reading. We aim to see every child as an individual, to find his or her level and help them to achieve their full potential. That is why we need to create a Toolbox for optimal teaching of basic skills to be used all over Europe. The partnership has two main objectives. The Toolbox of methods for increasing the five basic skills and the european dimension. We want to collect, try out and improve methods from all partner schools regarding the five basic skills and create a Toolbox for Optimal Teaching. Through our methods we want our students to take more responsibility for their own learning and to improve their ability of self-evaluation. We also aim to develop links between different European countries. This project activities will improve teachers`and pupils`understanding of cultural influences on the provision and the nature of education. We want the students to grow into a stronger European identity. The project - based activities will be integrated into the curriculum of the school. The cooperation will increase the teachers`ICT, English and professional skills. The students aged 6-12 participating in various activities will increase their self-esteem and motivation for learning, and thanks to high - quality teaching they will improve their basic and transversal skills. Both teachers and students will be engaged in every stage of planning, implementation, evaluation and dissemination of results. During the project we will have many activites for the pupils connected to the basic skills: Oral skills: themebased songs, storytelling, camera/video/dvd, school play, problemsolving Numeracy: everyday maths,money, measurement, cooking, time, distance, sports, PE, terms, calculations, creating a market place. Reading: critical reading, digital reading, advertisement, "reason to read", competition between schools Writing: create a book - continuous stories, word of the day,wordgames, use writing to describe learning, writing with different tools (pencil, mail/ICT, sms/phone), book creator ICT: Mail (personal versus private), chat (ethics, internet safety, anti-bullying), DVD, Skype, games, presentation about countries, show and tell, presentation in our native language. We will have two dolls from each country travelling between schools and they will be the main characters in DVDs, school plays etc. The main result of the project will be the Toolbox. The toolbox will include description of the methods, how the teachers can apply them, examples, expected results and what the methods want to affect. It will give the teachers the possibility to make their own teaching more efficient, varied, interesting and innovative. The toolbox will be presented to teachers and other members of school and local government. Also we will publish the Toolbox and make it available to other schools and teachers across Europe for potential long term use and benefits for them. The whole idea of a network of schools to solve a common problem through peer teaching can be useful for other schools or used in other fields of education.