Project: Erasmus+ Key action: Learning Mobility of Individuals Action: Mobility of learners and staff Action type: VET learner and staff mobility Project name: Improving the Quality of Teaching English, Motivating the Students and Use of New Technologies in Educational Process Start of project: 01.07.2014 Duration: 24 months End of project: 30. 06. 2016 Name of organisation: Bálint Balassi Hungarian Speaking Elementary School Vinica Our school is located in a nationally mixed territory within the Slovak Republic. It has 123 students in first to ninth grades and 14 teachers. Two languages (Hungarian and Slovak) are taught starting in the first grade, adding the 3rd one (English) from the third grade. Our school is humanist in nature and is open for all forms of educational development. The goal of this project is to enable our teachers to acquire new knowledge, information, lexical and practical skills abroad in International Study Programmes Cardiff, program 2 WEEK COURSE FOR EUROPEAN TEACHERS OF ENGLISH AT PRIMARY LEVEL - Language and Practical Methodology: Creativity in the Classroom, to get familiar with new innovative trends in teaching, new methods and forms that we will be able to use efficiently in every-day educational process. After they finish the internship, our goal is to apply the new knowledge in teaching and to offer our students not only a summary of language competencies but also general competencies so that their language training will effectively meet the requirements put on modern democratic citizens prepared for life in the unified Europe. Learning English fosters a more open attitude towards people. The educational process is focused on development of students’ communicational and cognitive competencies. Our plans are aimed at a quality teaching of English language in all classes of elementary education. The development of our educational activities is closely linked to the topic of the selected course Language and Practical Methodology. One teacher is enrolled to the project, Zsuzsa Deak, a teacher with a qualification for teaching at the first level of Hungarian speaking elementary schools and teaching of English. We plan a programme that would introduce teaching of English from pre-school age and also in first and second grade, whereas in Hungarian speaking schools English is only mandatory from third grade. We would also like to include other small rural schools in our area into our programme as our teacher is teaching English in them too. The programme should include 2 classes a week in kindergartens, 2 classes a week in the first grade and 3 classes a week in the second grade. Should the number of classes cause any problems, it is possible to make them available for example as an afterschool activity in the afternoon. In terms of pedagogical and psychological aspects, we plan to make use of CLIL, SKIMMING, SCANNING, Making grammar fun, Storytelling, Teaching vocabulary, Pre-reading, While-reading, Post-reading, TPRS and various forms of listening, speech and writing, drama, role play and all methods dealt with in the course. English as a world language and as such it is an indispensable teaching subject in elementary schools, having both linguistic and educational function. Long term benefits: We plan to organise trainings and workshops for other schools in the district and entire region. We want to share our experience and knowledge with other schools that we maintain friendly and cooperative relationships with. The information and experience will be promoted using blogs, eTwinning, newspaper articles and regional broadcasting. We are making plans to arrange open classes in institutes. There are 17 schools in the region and 7 more in Hungary that are involved and interested in receiving new information. The information may be shared for benefit of 34 teachers in our region and 21 teachers in Hungary. The number of students that will be involved in various activities is 367. The cooperation with kindergartens will include 15 teachers and 160-170 children. We make plans to connect with other teachers (teaching staffs) teaching English language to share experience, views, goals and methods, and if funding is available, to invite them to our school. Information technologies and opportunities offered by the Internet will be utilised to arrange conferences and sessions to share opinions. Classes will be presented over the Internet including discussions and sharing opinions within each thematic content.