Despite the set back due to Covid-19 restrictions throughout the whole first year of our project and a lot of frustration resulting from this, we were still working hard to put our ideas into practice.

We started with the class 9g at the beginning of the project phase and during that first year, when we weren't allowed to travel, the students nevertheless worked hard on reading and analyzing "The Book Thief" - Markus Zusak's novel, which was at the basis of the project: Characters were presented on posters, a timeline of the novel was produced.

This year's history class dealing with the time of the 3rd Reich was taught bilingually to prepare the students for their transnational meetings and expected discussions. In Natural Sciences the students researched heroes who had changed the world with their discoveries and in French the short novel "La chaise vide" opened yet another aspect of heroism.

We hosted two virtual project days on the school's platform Alfaview, which could accommodate all participants from our partner schools as well, to enable at least virtual encounters and thus an exchange about ideas about European Union Heroes (see page on virtual project days). The students presented their own schools virtually and had prepared a national quiz to give the others at least some idea about the places they had been meant to visit from the start.

In between those virtual project days we launched a logo contest, having learnt first what a logo should transport and asking all students at HGV to participate by creating fitting logos, which were then voted on within our own school family first before being taken to the international logo contest (see page logo contest) - and we were very proud that the proposal of Emily Maurer, 6c from our school actually won the international contest!

Asking for an extension of the project time, we were finally able to meet for real and started by preparing the teachers' meeting at HGV. Our students updated the new blue heroes pinboards with everything they had worked on during the first year of the project: characterizations of the novel's personnel, visual summaries of important aspects of the time of the 3rd Reich, the scientific heroes they had researched, posters with information about our partner schools as well as the goals of Erasmus+ and a description of our project. During that teacher mobility we decided on the timetable for our travels as well as on what we could and wanted to achieve while visiting each other (see page on C1).

We had gone from project work with one entire class to working with students in an extracurricular course and started preparing for the first trip to Italy by familiarizing ourselves with the Pixton app in order to work on a comic version of "The Book Thief".

We also started an instagram channel to present our project through the eyes of Flaps, our school project mascot (erasmus plus_germany-hgv) and thus, when visiting Genova the participating students could show the ones at home, what they were doing (see page on C2).

Coming home, we first updated our hero walls and then continued to work on the project by evaluating the mobility to Italy and preparing the next mobility to Portugal by researching typical Bavarian receipes as well as the history of the German flag and its anthem. Again Flaps was the messenger during the trip to Mafra, showing the students at home what we got to see and do (see page on C3).

Before the summer holidays we also invited the parents of our participants and had a nice summer party, showing videos, talking about first experiences and being exited about the next mobilities.

In the third year our participating students had moved on into the graduation course, which meant time was more limited than before, but they put a lot of work into the hosting of all partner schools in December. We researched German national heroes we wanted to present, prepared a guided tour showing our guests about resistance fighters in Munich, drew up a program fitting the project but not neglecting the fact that the guests would arrive during the first week of advent and worked hard on an adapted version of the first comic book from Italy: we wanted to apply Campbell's 12 steps of a hero's journey to our novel, Markus Zusak's "The Book Thief" and incorporate national heroes we had met during our travels as well as sites we had visited together with historical information about the time of WWII into the basic version that had been achieved in Genova. And we updated our blue hero walls to show the guests what we had done (see page on C4).

After evaluating the visit, there was still work to do, when preparing for the last mobility to Norway: We watched "Sabotage", a series to learn about the Heavy Waters so interesting for Nazi Germany and the brave men who destroyed Germany's hope for an atomic bomb without losing a single life in the act of sabotage (see page on C5). 

And coming back from Norway we wrapped up our project with yet another update of our hero walls and one last summer party, where we revisited all the work and all the traveling we got to do thanks to Erasmus+.

Powerpoint to summarize project work:

List of activities to download: