About the project
Enhancing Creativity and Sustainable Attitudes of Children through Play and Recycled Materials, aka. The SCRAPPIES project is an Erasmus+ funded project where we aim to increase awareness of ESD and develop new tools to make sustainability a fun and engaging topic for children to play with. Our mission is to demonstrate and instruct on the seamless transformation of school activities, rendering them more sustainable, multidimensional, and multidisciplinary, all with minimal effort and cost. We wish to empower schools to foster creativity and divergent thinking using unconventional materials like scrap items (e.g. bottles, foil, caps, cardboard packaging).
This approach helps students visualise lessons, making abstract concepts tangible and memorable for improved learning and retention. We firmly believe that this approach can revolutionise school curricula, placing sustainability at its core. Our aim is also to rekindle teachers’ enthusiasm for their profession, illustrating how lessons can become more multidimensional and increasing overall happiness and job satisfaction. We aspire to fortify teacher-student relationships while fostering sustainable practices, enhancing creativity, divergent thinking, cooperation, and resilience among students.
And finally, our ultimate goal is to create a more systematic, exciting, and lively teaching and learning process, benefiting both students and educators alike. The materials that we have produced as part of the SCRAPPIES project have been designed so that the teachers can work on such activities with children already at basic education levels, that the children can learn by example and absorb these good values from the activities and the teaching philosophy.
Partnership
Throughout the SCRAPPIES project, we gathered input from all three participating countries: Finland, Poland, and Hungary. In addition to reviewing the national curricula, we also interviewed various educators, municipal policymakers, hosted international webinars and training camps on sustainability, and conducted focus group sessions and piloting with teachers and students. As well as changing attitudes and building curiosity among child and adult learners alike, we share our experiences as educators and researchers, as well as information from educationalists and curricula in Finland, Poland, and Hungary.
The project contributors are University of Jyväskylä, Finland, Gratosfera Foundation, Poland, and Rogers Foundation, Hungary.
(For further information about the partners, click on the image.)
Resources
Our project includes the development of a sustainability handbook for educators, a toolkit of plug-and-play educational materials in the topic of sustainability called “snaps”, and open access webinars with international guest speakers to tackle the subject of sustainability. We also offer a training for teachers on how to use the created materials. Here:
Downloadable handbook and training
Snaps (both in leafable and downloadable format)
And here you can see some videos of how the Snaps were made
We wish you a happy time with the materials!
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.