Erasmus+ Newsletter January 2017

St George’s International School Luxembourg

Erasmus+ Newsletter By the Publicity team In this newsletter: 

What is Erasmus?

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Meet the teams

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Erasmus Lessons

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Luxembourg trip

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Spain trip

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Future Plans

February 2017

What is Erasmus+ ?

St George’s has teamed up with 4 other schools across Europe in order to participate in an Erasmus+ project. Our partner schools are in Poland, Greece, Spain and our lead school is in Croatia. We will cooperate in the Erasmus+ project: Ready, Steady, Work! This project was set up as part of Erasmus+, an EU initiative to encourage collaboration of schools to educate young people. The project is based around giving the schools a kit to help teach their students to make themselves more employable and to prepare them for the world of work. The project will take two years to complete and each school will organise a visit for the partner schools to share information.

There are 14 students and 11 teachers divided into three teams, in the Mobility Team we have; Annie, Ayah, Chloe, Hannah and Hilmir. The team is supervised by Mr Shaw and Mr Willsher. The Publicity Team consists of Chanah, Charlie, Eva and Ellen and there supervising teachers are Mrs White, Mrs Thomas and Mrs Hrgovic. The students in the Education Team are Isabel, Sacha, Sophie, Elize and Sebastian and the supervisors for the team are Mr. Edwards, Mr. Teale and Ms. Moody. Mr. Cooper is the Project Coordinator for the school.

Meet The Teams Education The Education Team have planned an SMSC lesson on "Problem Solving" skills to share with St George's partner schools. The lesson has been taught and refined by the team.

The Education Team will also visit local companies and European institutions with the partner school teachers during their visit to Luxembourg.

Mobility Ayah, Annie, Chloe, Hannah and Hilmir are all responsible for taking care of our future guests. The mobility team has been very active lately, as they have been planning a program for our guests from the participating countries.

The team has announced that a visit to the EIB, school based activities and sightseeing are all on the agenda.

The group have also been very busy making sure that all our guests are able to travel safely to and within Luxembourg.

Publicity The publicity team’s role is to spread the word about the project. This is done by using as much media as possible.

This includes a wiki page between all of the schools in the project to share their progress, a St George’s Twitter page to keep people informed and an information board put up in the Secondary building. There are articles in the main school newsletter and also in the national papers such as The Wort and The Chronicle.

Future Events Luxembourg We are very excited to announce that our partner schools will be visiting Luxembourg from 6th— 10th March 2017. Thanks to the work of the mobility team we have prepared a detailed itinerary for our visitors. We will provide a sightseeing tour around the city centre. Locations such as Place Guillaume, The Grund and the ‘Golden Lady’ are all on the list. We are very excited to welcome our guests and we hope that they will enjoy their stay here in the Grand Duchy!

Spain On the 22nd of April, four of our Erasmus team members (Annie, Ayah, Sacha and Chanah) and 2 members of staff (Mr Willsher and Ms Moody) will be flying to Cartagena. The trip will be documented through Twitter and various other social media so make sure to follow us @STG_Erasmus+. Since Cartagena is on the Mediterranean coast, we’ll have to ensure that the students don’t spend all their time at the beach, but also produce work with the host school!

Erasmus Lesson As part of the project the Education team must produce a lesson to promote employability skills in students. The lessons will first be taught here at St George’s before being passed onto the partner schools for them to teach to their students. One of these lessons was tested and taught to Year 10 students on Thursday 19th January. The lesson focused on problem solving in teams to improve this skill. Problem solving in the workplace is an invaluable skill as they can arise at any time and skills to resolve them quickly are greatly needed to stop the problem escalating. The lesson started with the students naming different skills required to efficiently problem solve and then they ranked them by importance. Then for the main bulk of the lesson the students were given a task to complete in groups of 8. This task was a mock situation of trying to get all 8 members from point A to point B using a lift that can only take 2. As well as this, certain other rules must be met such as only 3 people can operate the lift and certain people must be accompanied by a certain type of person dependant on their role.

Although this may sound easy it was in practice much harder, taking around 20 of the full 25 minutes to complete. Despite a few conflicts that the students successfully resolved, they worked efficiently as a team. Overall the feedback was very positive.

Future Plans Since Erasmus+ is an ongoing project, each of our teams will develop their own aspects of the project, however they will all communicate with one another to ensure the ‘final piece’ is an equal effort. The Publicity team will keep social media and the school newsletter constantly updated with images and articles about current events around Erasmus+, as well as adding things to our board in school.

The Education team will carry on developing their lessons and instructive techniques by trialling with younger students and taking their feedback on the tasks. As of now, the Mobility team are planning our guests’ visit and more specific things can be planned such as bus trips, tours and reservations to a variety of restaurants.  

September 2017 — Visit to Poland Spring 2018 — Visit to Athens