Breakfast Breaks in Vesanto (FIN)

As a part of our Erasmus+ project Young European and well-being, we had breakfast breaks in our school on Monday 23 February and on Friday 27 February. On Monday, the school served oatmeal with some berries and on Friday we has a fruit smoothie. 

Some of our students interviewed other students and teachers and other staff members about these breakfast breaks and about their own breakfast habits. These interviews were made into an article in the local newspaper Sisä-Savo.

According to the interviews, our upper secondary school students eat in quite a healthy way. Many people say that they eat oatmeal or bread and drink coffee. They said that a healthy breakfast consists of fruit, berries and grain products. 

Most of the students interviewed thought that eating breakfast at school would be a good practice, which could be a good solution in the future. Especially, because many of them don’t have time to eat breakfast at home. A few students remarked that this breakfast break took too much time from the first lesson of the day, as we had our breakfast breaks at the very beginning of our school day.

The students also interviewed one our school kitchen workers, Pirkko Nenonen. She said that usually she eats porridge, fruit or vegetables and drinks coffee. She thinks that a healthy breakfast should include grain products, fruit or berries, good oils and milk. Breakfast breaks could be done in the future as well, but the arrangements would have to be different than this time. This could be something that is done once a month, for example. 

One of our teachers, Matti-Pekka Pöyhönen, was also interviewed for the article. He said that he eats breakfast every day, most of the time it consists of wholegrain bread, cereals, smoothies and eggs. He thinks that breakfast breaks might work if the food was served before the lessons begin or only once a week.

Below, you can see some pictures of the breakfast breaks and also a picture of the newspaper article.

Supportive initiative - Let's share our knowledge! (Poland)

To share the knowledge gained through the working on the project we invited to our school kids from the kindergarten “Raczek”. The group of twenty children at the age of five came with their teachers to participate in the lesson conducted by our primary school English teacher. They learnt names of fruit and vegetables in English, sing thematic songs and talked about the role of healthy diet in our life. That visit was very enjoyable and we are looking forward to repeating this experience!

http://przedszkoleraczek.pl

Supportive initiatives - Let's talk about the exchange! (Poland)

In order to promote the project, and to motivate our younger pupils, the students participating in the exchange prepared motivational Power Point presentations about their experiences in Italy. They talked about the Italian school, working on the project and their general feelings concerning differences between Italian and Polish culture. 

A newspaper article about our project (Vesanto, FIN)

On 23 April 2015, a newspaper article was published on Sisä-Savo, a local newspaper. The article was mainly about the breakfast breaks and the school gardens activities.

The presentation on organic and locally produced food in Finland and Vesanto (FIN)

Here you can see the presentation made by the upper secondary school students of Vesannon yhtenäiskoulun lukio. The topic is organic and locally produced food.

Self-evaluations (Vesanto, FIN)

Our students answered two self-evaluative questionnaires related to the Erasmus+ YEW activities in our school. 96 students from secondary and upper secondary school answered the questions in the first questionnaire in January 2015 and 28 upper secondary school students answered the second one in May 2015. In the questionnaire, we asked them to evaluate the project activities and the project in general. Below, you will find out the most relevant results of these questionnaires.

Self-evaluation 1

77 % of the students felt that they had received enough information about the Erasmus+ project in our school. Also 77 % agreed or slightly agreed that they were interested in the themes of our project. 90 % of the students agreed or slightly agreed that it is a good thing that we have a project like this in our school. 

74 % of the students felt that our Health Week was useful to them and 72 % of the students felt that they found out some surprising information while making the posters about a healthy diet for our Health Week. Overall, 76 % felt that they learned new things about a healthy diet and 81 % felt that working on the posters was rewarding. 

85 % of the students felt that making presentations on Finland, Vesanto and our school in English was nice. 71 % thought that their English skills improved while doing that. 

Overall, the students seemed quite pleased with the project and its activities. Some students thought that we could have more projects like this and that this project will increase students’ well-being. Some secondary school students felt that the project was more aimed at the older students in upper secondary school and they wished that they could participate more. Some students also would have wanted more information about the project or the Rimini trip in advance. In our school, the project is indeed more aimed at the upper secondary school students, but we try to involve the whole school in some parts of the project.

Self-evaluation 2

86 % of the upper secondary school students participated in the breakfast breaks, when free breakfast was served in our school. Some of them ate only the porridge, some only the smoothie and some ate both. 82 % of the students agreed or slightly agreed that the breakfast breaks reminded them of the importance of eating breakfast in general. 85 % agreed or slightly agreed that in the future, a similar kind of breakfast could be served. 

Only 44 % of the students agreed or slightly agreed that they got new information about a healthy diet when they were working on the healthy eating pyramid activity. The reason behind this quite low number could be that this topic was already discussed in health education lessons earlier. About 60 % of the students found working on the healthy eating pyramid to be meaningful and 52 % of the students felt that their English skills improved while working on the healthy eating pyramid.

68 % of the students felt that the lessons held by the school nurse was informative, whereas 65 % of the students felt that it was nice to work on the leaflet about healthy living in Vesanto. 43 % felt that they got new perspective to their hometown thanks to the leaflet. 62 % of the students felt that their English skills improved while working on it. 

58 % of the students received new information about organic and locally produced food while working on the presentation about it. Altogether 76 % of the students who worked on that presentation felt that their English vocabulary expanded. 

92 % of the students who participated in the students exchange in Rimini felt that they got to use a lot of English during the meeting and 69 % agreed or slightly agreed that their English skills improved during the meeting. 92 % agreed or slightly agreed that working in multicultural groups in Rimini went smoothly. Also, 92 % of these students felt that they learned new skills during the Rimini meeting. All the students felt that the trip to Rimini was a success. When the students were asked to freely comment on the meeting in Rimini, answers like this occurred:

-          “The trip to Rimini is the best thing that the school has offered so far. I have nothing to complain about, more stuff like this!”

-          “All in all, it was a nice trip, I got to use and develop my language skills, and getting to know new people and a new culture was interesting. I especially liked sports on the beach and the Rimini tour, but almost everything else was nice, too. At times, the organization of our days in school could have been a bit smoother.”

-          “The trip was fun, at times I felt bored because I don’t understand Italian and we followed some lessons in Italian.”

-          “The best thing was the food and the people!”

-          “I have good feelings about the trip and we are planning to meet again with the students from our Italian host families.”

43 % of the students would give the first year of Erasmus+ the school grade 8 (=good), 25 % would give it the school grade 9 (=commendable) and about 18 percent would give it the school grade 10 (=excellent). 14 % of the students would give it a grade below 8. When the students were asked to freely comment on the Erasmus+ project so far, these kinds of answers appeared:

-          “The health week was nice.”

-          “We had enough different kinds of activities and projects.”

-          “All the activities have been quite nice and informative.”

-          “I can’t remember that much about the activities. I guess they were OK.”

-          “The activities were nice and they were a welcome change to our normal school days.”

-          “I wish that during the Rimini week, there would have been more oral exercise for us who stayed in Finland.”

-          “I am not that interested in international co-operation, so that’s why I don’t really care for this kind of projects.”

-          “The trip to Rimini was the best.”

-          “It has been successful.”

-          “The ideas have not been very special, but in practice they have been exceptional and nice.”

Overall it seems that at least the upper secondary students, who have mostly participated in the activities, are quite pleased with the first year of the project.