The winner of the Nordplus Junior Aurora Award 2024 is Riga 5th Elementary School Development Center in Latvia!
The victory was overwhelming for the winning project this year. “Development of methods of physical activity for children with functional disabilities" won the Aurora poll with 74 percent of the votes. Sanita Mežiniece is the coordinator of the project and she is surprised.
Due to covid-19, the implementation of our project took a long time and became more complicated than we planned, so this was a pleasant surprise. Now we will let the Aurora Award inspire us and others to continue supporting students with special needs. There is a lot to do!
What does it mean to you to receive the Aurora Award?
The award shows that we are on the right track. It means a lot to our team. We will continue to use everything we learned from the project, conducting sports lessons with our students and share examples of good practice with colleagues from other schools. All students are unique and capable of reaching their full potential with the right support and teaching methods.
Part of the project has been to produce a method book for physical activity for students with disabilities. To the book "Methods of physical activity for children with functional disabilities"
2. "Development of methods of physical activity for children with functional disabilities"
A combination of teachers' exchange and collaboration project between Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia on inclusion. Focus of the project has been finding methods to motivate and inspire students with functional variations to be more active for example in sports education.
The project was coordinated by Riga 5th Elementary School - Development Center (LV-r5sips) in Latvia.
Partners:
- Siauliai Sanatorine school (Lithuania)
- Ringuvos special school (Lithuania)
- Tartu Herbert Masingu school (Estonia)
Motivation of the jury for nomination:
The project's clear and well-defined goal has led to a distinct result in a digital book of methods on activities for children with functional variations that teachers in that field of work can use. During the visits participants shared experiences and best practices. The project ended up in a conference.
More information:
Ringuvos special school
Tartu Herbert Masingu school
Winning project
With the annual Nordplus Junior Aurora Award we want to find and highlight good results from Nordplus Junior projects and celebrate successes for students, teachers, preschools, schools and other organizations.
The winning projects receive, in addition to honour and attention, a diploma and a trip with and overnight stay to Stockholm in connection to the award ceremony at EMIL - a meeting place for international learning - which will take place in November.
Watch a film about the winning project 2022 (Youtube)
Read an article about the winning project 2023
Nomination
For 2024, the national Nordplus offices have nominated ongoing or recently completed projects which:
- have started 2019-2022
- connect to Nordplus current highlight social sustainability
- successfully integrates the project in the organizations, the development needs of the participants and each county´s curricula
- is a best practice and a great example of a Nordplus Junior Project that should be promoted.