Skating for Kids And Teachers all over Europe

The two biggest outcomes reached by the project are: i. the creation of a transnational (European) network among three local skating clubs (from Spain, Italy and Portugal) and the Spanish Skating Federation. This network set up a regular technical working group who is capable of sharing experiences and who built a common method to deliver skating competences/skills among children and to study skating impact on kids social wellness. Either of them has never participated to such international network. ii. the large participation of children (including small ones) to sport activities. This participation took place under a common approach and in an inclusive context. i. Due to these peer-review activities (based on systematic exchanges among coaches and managers), two important technical outputs have been achieved: i. an initial-level 40-lesson skating teaching handbook that contains details of each class to be delivered in a first year skating course (8-month training); ii. a list of indicators capable of measuring skating competences acquired by children (this work is contained in a document which includes indicators / evaluating exercises to be applied / pictures representing expected movements). The Handbook includes the objective of each class, the explanations on how to teach the expected competences, the pictures and the exercises. Both outputs drafts are available in the Results platform of the project. Both outputs were tested in the three project contexts and represent a common work and joint efforts that have been made to achieve high quality pedagogic documents. Many key findings were systematically collected and included in the final versions of the documents. ii. Additionally, thank to this project, an important awareness building campaign (on HEPA principles) took place in Grosseto (Italy), Alacalà de Henares (Spain) and Alenquer (Portugal). Due to a collaboration process that was reinforced between the local clubs and the local schools, the number of children who joint the skating courses increased strongly. The increasing demand has not entirely been absorbed by the regular courses of the clubs who were not able to deal with those big numbers. The children that have not been taken over were driven to other clubs in order to preserve kids' interest and sporting participation.One of the most important "non-expected" result is the opportunity allowed by the project to the coaches to learn one from each other and to exchange experiences and knowledge with a view to improving quality and upholding standards. Beginners-level coaches have few opportunities to dedicate time to training and to meet colleagues from other clubs. Most of them are autodidact and usually work alone; they are usually considered “less important” than “big coaches”.The project main results can be synthesized as follows: i. increased children participation in health-enhancing physical activities; ii. improved and increased quality of skating teaching techniques; iii. developed monitoring and evaluation systems aimed at evaluating the effects of the skating teaching at different levels and at different times. Last but not least, iv. fostered the role of skating in the sportive world.