eTwinning in Early Childhood Education and Care: what, why and how?

According to the European Commission, quality ECEC supports young children’s growing, learning and flourishing, and is especially important for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. In this context, ECEC staff (teachers, assistants, auxiliary staff) have been identified as the most significant factor for children’s well-being, learning and developmental outcomes. Therefore, supporting the initial and continuous professional development of ECEC staff constitutes an important necessity in order to ensure that children’s needs and rights, relevant societal developments and gender equality are taken into consideration.

To this regard, eTwinning, the biggest learning community of teachers in Europe, supports ECEC staff through the development of national and cross-national collaborations, various professional development offers and recognition. Acknowledging that recognising teachers’, students’ and schools’ work is important and that it deserves to be shared and recognised locally, nationally, and Europe-wide, eTwinning has included ECEC in its ultimate expression of honour, the eTwinning European Prizes.

So, in 2019, we had our first two winners in the age category of up to 6. The project 'Storytelling leads to robotics' illustrated how robotics, literature and digital storytelling can be embedded in pre-schooling by promoting students’ collaboration as well as personal and emotional expression. Moreover, the project ‘Learning with experiments’ focused on how experiments and digital tools can be employed to facilitate pupils’ learning in the fields of Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Chemistry. 

One year later, in 2020, 'Busy Bugs in my Bag' and 'Small Scientists across Europe' were the winning projects. The first project combined Natural Sciences, Art and ICT in inquiring into nature and into specific bugs, promoting students’ learning, use of English and intercultural competence. The second project managed to introduce the abstract concept of Science to the preschool curriculum via games and experiments by embracing students’ imagination and promoting environmental sustainability. 

In 2021, the project 'eTreeHuggers: 1, 2, TREE, HUG the TREES with me' combined the natural and cultural aspects of trees in order to promote children’s learning on various topics and areas such as coding, Art, ICT tools and Environmental Education. Finally, the project 'S.T.E.A.M-tastic' aimed at exploring STEAM subjects and led, with the active engagement of pupils, to the creation of an ebook.

Such project examples show that eTwinning can be a beneficial learning experience for pupils in ECEC, as well as for the teachers involved. The core values and pupil-centred learning approaches, along with the intercultural dynamics created by cross-national collaborations and the digital tools, create a promising space for innovation, imagination and learning. Join us to find out more!