Fit to Belong

Our 3rd transnational project meeting was held in Pozega, Serbia on 2-3 May 2022.

Our second LTTA took place on the dates 28Feb-4th March 2022 in Manisa, Turkiye.

“First contact with kids from other countries. It was a very cool moment and it helped me feel more connected with them”.

Photo and text by Guilherme on the first day of the mobility in Poland. Many thanks 🌷

It was a great experience to physically come together as the members of one team working in different parts of Europe. We both worked hard and had lots of fun. Thank you for offering us such an enjoyable experience! 10 December 2021.

The first Fit yo Belong meeting with students took place between 6-10 December 2021 in Łódź.

Peer support workshops in Petar Lekovic Primary School:
Students who have learning difficulties can often feel lonely, isolated, and rejected. Peer support may have great power and sometimes gives better results than teacher strategies.
We tried to apply for peer support with younger students - 3rd and 4th grade. After the workshop was organized by the school counselor, the students were divided into pairs. Weaker students got their own peer mentor, who regularly helped them with homework at school and online. Students studied with their mentors for school exams, but they also socialized more intensively and got to know each other better.
The aim of this activity is to encourage supportive peer experiences, to develop empathy, compassion, and care for others, and to promote an inclusive attitude among peers. Also, it should increase motivation to learn, encourage curiosity and perseverance and create original ideas.

If you want to discuss an important topic with students in an unobtrusive but interesting way, to interest them in the content and not burden them, the best way is to learn through games. An escape game is a favorite students’ activity and it is becoming increasingly popular at schools. Through these games students are actively involved in the learning process, they think, explore, connect and have fun while acquiring new knowledge.
Using these games and web tools, students can also learn during distance learning. This game was made by the teachers of the Petar Leković Elementary School in order to increase students' awareness of the reasons why loneliness occurs and the ways in which it can be prevented.
The player is placed in the position of a student who is locked in the school and needs to find the code that unlocks the front door. To discover the code, a player must go through several classrooms. In these classrooms, he gets acquainted with the contents (videos about loneliness), answers questions related to video, and solves tasks. The goal of the game is to successfully solve all the tasks and unlock the door and get out as soon as possible.
Try this interesting game and unlock the door:

Escape loneliness by olgicaspasojevic on Genially Discover more about Escape loneliness ✌️ - Escape games

One of the activities we organized at the Petar Leković Elementary School within the Fit to Belong project was a peer workshop. Older students taught younger ones about internet safety and cyberbullying.
The aims of this activity were to increase students' awareness of the importance of safety and responsible behavior on the Internet; to introduce them to the forms and possible consequences of cyberbullying; to increase weaker students’ self-confidence and self-esteem by putting them in the role of educators of their peers.
Older students (8th grade) organized workshops for younger students (5th and 6th grade). Workshops consist of lectures (presentations), discussions, exchanges of experiences, and Kahoot quizzes. Workshops are carried out by students who have lower achievements in formal education and less often participate in extracurricular activities, so they often feel neglected and less valuable. This workshop is an opportunity for them to participate more actively in school life and show their abilities.
All participants were very motivated. The student educators were responsible and took the task seriously. Younger students found it interesting to learn from older friends, especially about this topic. They actively participated in the discussion, asked questions, and described their experiences. It turns out that students more seriously take advice on behavior on the internet when it comes from their peers than from adults.

Providing a supportive and inclusive school ethos is one of the important factors to prevent loneliness and strengthen belongingness among school children.
We organized a quiz for 8th-grade students in our school, the Petar Leković Elementary School. Through various games such as word matching, associations, discovering an enigmatic personality, discovering a picture, our students were encouraged to think about important topics.
The questions on the quiz are formulated to raise students’ awareness of wellbeing, belonging, friendship, physical and mental health, tolerance, social inclusion. The games are used not only to check the students’ knowledge in these areas but also to acquaint them with important facts (after the correct answers to the questions, additional information is given).
Following prevention measures, there was no audience, but all students and parents could follow it via video stream.

Today we have the last story about Fit To Belong long-term partnership and its results.
How a decrease in loneliness of youth can contribute to bullying prevention?
,,I think that it can help reduce cases of bullying. A person may feel the urge to make fun of others, because they feel like they aren’t enough, misunderstood and excluded. In this case, if a student is involved in positive activities with peers, they feel that they can open up and trust people around them. As a result, this may reduce the desire to humiliate and mock others. On the other hand, if the person who experiences bullying has someone to rely on, they may not feel lonely, be more psychologically resilient, so the mocking might stop. Bullying is also related to many other aspects, so it’s important to cooperate with parents, understand the causes of bullying, so the situation should be assessed comprehensively. In addition, I believe that the ideas proposed by students to reduce loneliness for this project can help new students adapt to schools. Collaborative activities, getting to know like-minded people makes it easier to adapt to the new environment, which is also related to better academic achievements. So the student’s adaptation in the school is very important, and the methods that are being developed during this project, can make a positive contribution to it. ” – Indrė.
It‘s clear that we still have a long way to go before solving the issue of loneliness, but long journeys that require effort and patience usually lead to a goal worth pursuing. Through this and other Erasmus + funded non-formal education projects, Tavo Europa aims to dive deeper into issues that are less popular and follow young people to make this world better for all of us.
The project is funded by Erasmus+.