Project Meeting Report

Broken Family Children is a 2-year project within the EU / Erasmus+ project network, which began in 2018, lasted until 2020, and included 5 countries: Turkey as project coordinator, alongside Poland, Romania, Italy, and North Macedonia as partner countries.

In this project, workshops, trainings and disseminations were planned and held in the schools in all countries, aimed at overcoming problems that children / students from “broken” families are faced with, where one or both parents are not present in the child's life due to a variety of reasons - migration, divorce, leading separate lives etc.

Within the project, teachers from each school were observing, studying and exploring ways of dealing with and, eventually, overcoming these family issues, which many students experience in their daily lives.

Teachers have shared their gained knowledge and experience with their colleagues, and will continue to develop ways and methods for properly guiding students in their education and in life, encouraging them to participate in many extracurricular activities that boost their confidence, way of learning, and acting toward themselves and others.

In the period from 02-05.12.2018, the first transnational coordinative meeting of the international KA229 Erasmus+ "Broken Family Children" project was held in Tarsus, Turkey. The meeting focused on discussing the project management, its implementation and dissemination.

In the period from 25-29.03.2019, the second planned LTT meeting was held in Kolobrzeg, Poland. The purpose of the meeting was to develop effective methods for working with “broken” family children.

In the period from 16-19.09.2019, the third transnational coordinative meeting was held at the “Petre Ghelmez” school in Bucharest, Romania.
At the meeting, examples of good practice and the positive impact of this project were presented.

In the period from 04-08.11.2019, the fourth LTT mobility was held at the partner school in Naples, Italy. At this meeting, the teachers got acquainted with CLIL methodology, as well as with some of the sports activities practiced at the school as a successful method of inclusion.

The final transnational meeting of the project was to be held in North Macedonia. However, due to the ongoing worldwide COVID-19 crisis, it was decided (in consultation with the National Agencies of each country) that the meeting would be held online via the Zoom video-conferencing platform. It was scheduled and held on June 10th, 2020.

The entire online meeting was recorded and hosted by Biljana Arsova (North Macedonia project coordinator), Emilija Naumovska (English language teacher), Elena Blazhevska (French language teacher), and attended by participants from all the other project countries.

The meeting went without any technical difficulties, according to the planned agenda, with discussions, PowerPoint presentations and video presentations.

At the beginning, each country shortly explained how they managed the process of teaching in the new corona-virus situation, after which the project description and goals were briefly elaborated, followed by a presentation of the characteristics and important, impressive places to visit in North Macedonia.

The project website was mentioned, on which all realized activities are posted.

The Macedonian educational system and its features were presented, as well as the municipal primary school “Cyril and Methodius”, located in Stajkovci, Skopje, its mission, vision, current school and extracurricular activities.

All realized project partner country visits were also shortly presented, and the project disseminations that MPS “Cyril and Methodius” had held throughout the duration of the project.

One of the final presentations was the school psychologist’s overview of the project, after which each country discussed their own opinion, experience and benefit of the project. It was concluded that the “broken” family children situation is a broad and delicate one, in constant need of observing and improving, which is why the goals of the project will continue to be an integral part of the daily teaching process.

Throughout the meeting, video presentations about the capital, Skopje, as well as Ohrid, one of cities planned to be visited, were shown, and a video about extracurricular activities in which students from “broken” families had been included.

The meeting ended with a song entitled "Building Bridges", as a symbol of unity, connecting countries and cultures and uniting students and teachers of different nationalities.

After the meeting, the host country will send certificates of attendance to all participants in the meeting, signed by the school headmaster.

Photos from final online meeting on Zoom on 10.06.2020, you can see on following link: