Motivation III - ESA - Italy

November - December 2018
This is an Erasmus+ project coordinated by Italy 🇮🇹 and shared by Poland 🇵🇱, Portugal 🇵🇹, Romania 🇷🇴 and Turkey 🇹🇷. The main aim is top recent early school leaving through students ‘ participation in clubs. Read more
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  • Porto - Verona - Bosco Chiesanuova

    November 26, 2018 in Italy ⋅ ⛅ 11 °C

    In Italy we spent seven days learning about photography and its usage for motivating students’ awareness of self esteem and safety. It was also an amazing way to get mingled with European culture, because it is easy to capture it through the camera’s lenses.

    The first day we spent it travelling. From the Oporto airport we flew to Milan, took a train to the city centre and then to Verona Porta Nuova station, in Verona. We started at 3:45 in the morning in Vieira do Minho and arrived in Bosco Chiesanuova, Verona, at 19:30. Meanwhile we had 3 hours to walk around Verona and lazily enjoy the city centre. Soooo beautiful!

    But for the project sake what really matters was the meeting in Bosco. All the hosting families and teachers were waiting for us and a welcome party was prepared in the hotel where the teachers stayed. Students went to families. The first impact was a bit scary because nobody knew what to expect.
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  • Bosco Chiesanuova

    November 27, 2018 in Italy ⋅ ⛅ 12 °C

    The morning started with all partners meeting again at the hotel. Bosco is a mountain city and we walked down to school. It was about 400m and it was a pleasant morning stroll. At school the headmaster and some teachers were waiting for us and we had quite a nice presentation about Bosco and the surrounding area. It is located in a national park, just like Gerês, but the geological origin of it is quite different because Lessinia is of limestone and marble, whereas Gerês is of sandstone.
    Anyway, after a tour around school and a lunch break, we walked through the park to visit a house where cheese was made in the past and learn about all the process. From this day onwards, the students had dinner at home with the hosting families.
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  • Venice

    November 28, 2018 in Italy ⋅ ☀️ 9 °C

    Venice was ready to fill in the empty pages of our sketchbook, but this time we didn’t use a pencil. We had our cellphones ready to capture the nicest frames of the city, and that’s what we did. This is one of the most photogenic cities in the world and we were so fortunate to put in practice all the details that we learned the day before. Symmetrical buildings coming from colourful reflections in the water. Clear perspectives coming from the long canals as if they are infinite lines and the three third rules that are so important in photo composition were all so easy to perceive. This was great to share with all the partners all the knowledge we had.Read more

  • Cerro Veronese - Bosco Chiesanuova

    November 28, 2018 in Italy ⋅ ☀️ 6 °C

    This day started for students directly at school. The German class was the one that received them and they presented themselves, along with some members of the Polish team. After that we attended a photo workshop. Students were given a picture of themselves. They had to cut it in half, stick it to an A3 paper and complete the missing half by drawing or any other type of graphic representation. The purpose was to rise their sense of self esteem and awareness. This was a funny exercise that was lead by an Italian arts teacher. The Portuguese team had teacher Antonina - the best arts teacher - who also helped all the students around.
    In the afternoon we were learning photographic techniques to put in practice on the following day in the open air photo landscape of Venice. Geometric values and aesthetic parameters were taught to be used accordingly during the following day, but before going home we could still visit the stop motion laboratory to which we will go back to on Thursday.
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  • Roverè

    November 29, 2018 in Italy ⋅ ☀️ 2 °C

    We spent this day in a different school. Roverè is a mountain village and it was pretty cold when we arrived there. On the way, on shady places the frost covered the hills with ice crystals, that later were glittering in the sun.
    The students from this school were waiting for us and were very proud of all the things they did at school. The robotics LEGO league competition in which they are involved, their regular classrooms and also the school facilities. The morning ended up with the final rehearsal of “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens. A moving simple adaptation of this amazing book.
    Before lunch it was still time to use photo techniques on the mountain. The hiking tour lead us through a winter wood full of art! I mean, real paintings were hanging on the trees!
    The afternoon was under the surface. This time it was a forest of stone. Stalactites and stalagmites are formed in the Cave of Monte Capriollo. It is a funny place with limestone formations, bats and an imported cave creature from the Dolomites caves called Protheus. It is white, blind, has red ears and eats alive worms. But the mountains still had something special for us: an amazing red sunset!
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  • Verona

    December 1, 2018 in Italy ⋅ ☀️ 7 °C

    Verona one more time. This time started from the opposite way: on top of the hill where the city can be viewed, the river can be seen and the cold air gets into your lungs as if you didn’t even need to make it happen.
    Downhill we ended up in the oldest bridge in the world - UNESCO of course - Ponte Pietra, not before visiting the Roman theatre. This is an open air museum and the whole day we have an history class going on with the Italian teachers in the morning and a specialized tourist guide for the Arena in the afternoon.
    English Literature was obviously focused on the way, wouldn’t it be the city of Romeo and Juliet. We visited the house of Shakespeare’s heroine, touched her breast for luck and gazed at the balcony where she would supposedly be.
    The Roman Empire can be seen all over the city but the Arena is the best preserved one in Italy and nowadays it is still a place for shows - gladiators were substituted by opera or pop concerts. The acoustics is outstanding!
    But the day was far from being over because after “reality lessons” the hosting families of the Italian students took everybody to school for a farewell party with local food prepared by themselves.
    It was an amazing experience. Teachers and students have learned so much from this experience and the purpose of the project was accomplished, but this is just the beginning. We went to Italy to learn, we have put some things in practice there but our school is waiting for us to tell them how we can use photography to motivate students’ awareness of self esteem and safety.
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  • Back home

    December 1, 2018 in Italy ⋅ 🌫 3 °C

    Coming back home was also part of the project learning experience.
    The Italian train system isn’t the best thing in the world. So, what we most feared happened: we had to catch two trains and the first one was so late that we couldn’t catch the second. Still, we were lucky enough to have a second one a bit later. We only had ten minutes but that would have been more than enough to be relaxed. The only problem was that apparently the last platform was number four, so I asked where platform one - ours- was and we ended up in the metro station, according to five different security officers at the platforms... Lesson: stop, look better and trust your feelings. We ended up running like mad people and begging the train officer for two more minutes because not everybody was inside the train. It was a crazy rush but team work solved it all. Thanks Portuguese team for being so fast!Read more