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Globalisation confronts the European Union with new challenges, all citizens need to adapt a wide range of key competences flexibly to a rapidly changing and highly interconnected world.

Education, in its dual role, both social and economic, plays a key role in ensuring that Europe's citizens acquire the key competences to adapt flexibly to such changes.

In particular, building on different individual skills, the different needs of learners should be met through equality and access for all groups.

This is particularly true for those groups that need special support due to educational disadvantages caused by personal, social, cultural or economic reasons.

The key competences can be illustrated in many examples. In the rainforest, for example.

96% of the plants do not come from Guadeloupe, but have "immigrated". The plants must "understand" each other and communicate in order to grow as optimally as possible. The plants support each other with their natural conditions - one provides shade, the other attracts the animals, which in turn carry on the seeds of the trees. Other plants form a supporting structure for climbing plants. In a storm, the variety of plants is the strength against the storm.

What does this mean for our society?

Find the key competences!

Support the Member States in training their young people!

Offers a political reference tool for political decision-makers!

Provides a framework for further action in both education and training!

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Today we learnt about the 8 key competences for lifelong learning. They all are considered equally important, so we should try to include all of them in our school curriculum and our lessons. It is really important not to teach the students simple isolated facts, but to make them learn and experience new things with all senses - by hearing, speaking, writing, touching. This is what we did today in the rainforest. Such projects as a visit of an interesting place foster all key competences and make the students create connection between different subjects and points of view.
Back home I will definitely try to do some international projects with my students which include all key competences.

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The rainforest is a real paradise with a beautiful waterfall. We also saw plantations of bananas and sugar cane. The nature was amazing. We also visited a rum distillery, where we could follow the process of obtaining rum from sugar cane. We experienced a real downpour - it was a rainforest indeed :)

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we learned a lot and made experiences with all our senses while visiting the rainforest and a rum distillery. We really can imagine now what is a rain forest, because it was raining cats and dogs....

One theory of learning Styles:
Can you identify your preferred style? How could your preferred learning be used to improve your skills? Consider that you will always use multiple learning styles, although you might favor one. Sometimes there are three types of learners discussed: visual learners, auditory learners, and kinesthetic learners. A set of learning strategies specific to each follows.
Visual learners are proficient at reading charts, spelling, learning by watching videos or demonstrations, and using words and phrases that evoke visual images.
Auditory learners prefer to receive information by verbal explanation rather than by reading. They like to talk through concepts, give presentations, or read out loud. Read aloud when you want to focus on learning specific concepts from your readings. Take advantage of any opportunity to discuss out loud texts you are reading or writing with other people. Talk about your ideas with someone else. As you talk, write an outline and consider ways to structure your ideas.
Kinesthetic learners absorb, process, and retain new information best by doing, moving, or engaging in activities that require interaction with others. Draw, underline, or highlight in your book while reading, make graphs, diagrams, and concept maps to help you understand the material. Look for active ways to engage your ideas. Post parts of your essay on the walls of your room and walk around as you read them. Seeing them on the wall and moving around the room may help you to identify new ideas or ways to improve your work.
Ideas for learning:
 Learning with all senses, try to combine, reading, smelling, tasting looking, hearing, feeling….
 Learning needs movements. Try to move your body, so walk while learning vocabularies.
 Prepare your workplace for learning:
 Put all the materials you need ready.
 Take all things that could distract you from the desk.
 Turn off your smartphone, phone, radio, TV. Ventilate the room regularly and ensure a comfortable room temperature.
 Know the Importance of prior knowledge. Connect new learning content with old ones.
 For vocabulary learning or professional designations use a card index. Write the vocabulary or words on a piece of paper and put it in a file box with three to four compartments. The cards come first in the first compartment. If you master them while interrogating, they slip a tray backwards. Every word that you do not know stays in its subject. Work through the individual subjects regularly.
 Listen: Record vocabulary and listen to it regularly with the MP3 player or smartphone, e.g. while jogging. Inventing History: Think up a story with the new vocabulary.
 Know where you are in your learning path.

Structure knowledge
 You can also structure it as you probably need it in the exam. "According to recent studies, the strategy is very successful - especially for the long-term retention of information. If information is brought into a certain structure, this also has a positive effect on the performance.
 Mindmap helps to extract information and save it. Likewise, complex topics can be covered with a mind map and it is a very flexible tool.
 Students should use strategies they are already familiar with, such as: Eg index cards or mindmaps, the School Psychologist advises: "
 Another good option for hard-to-impress content is, for example, the Platz method. Certain learning content is written on paper and placed in the home or room at specific locations. When you pass by, you read the material over and over and remember it.
 Create a learning plan. Start planning ahead of time. Make a list of content you want to learn. Mark free times in the calendar where you can learn. Distribute the learning content to the free times. Plan enough breaks during the learning phases.
 Try to connect your learning contents/tasks to a complete act.

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Today was a day full of greenery. We visited the beautiful rainforest, where nature amazingly "cooperates" with each other. We, people, who are looking at this rainforest, should take an example of how different species can cooperate and COEXIST. There was a beautiful waterfall Chute de Carbet. Rita also told us how the key competences can be realised with students in relation to this place. These ideas can stimulate to think about more activities to develop key competences during our work at school.

We also visited a rhum distillery, where the source of glucose is sugar cane. In Guadeloupe, there is a perfect climate for growing sugar cane.

It is the interesting fact, that in this process it is not added any yeasts because they are naturally contained in sugar cane and can be directly ferment into ethanol. The process of manufacturing of “LONGUETEAU agricultural rum includes 3 steps: 1. Extraction of juice cane 2. Fermentation
C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁ + H₂O → C₆H₁₂O₆ + C₆H₁₂O6

During fermentation, sugar (glucose from saccharose, saccharose from sugar cane) from plant material is converted into ethanol and carbon dioxide. This typically takes place at temperatures of around 30°C. The enzymes found in single-celled fungi (yeast) are the natural catalysts that can make this process happen:

C₆H₁₂O₆ → 2C₂H₅OH + 2CO2

Ethanol – C₂H₅OH

3. Distillation”.

The ethanol produced by yeast only reaches a concentration of around 15 percent before the ethanol becomes toxic to the yeast. In order to make it sufficiently concentrated (to be more concentrated), the ethanol must be distilled.

Distillation separates the alcohol from the water as they both boil and evaporate at different temperatures. The rhum can be distilled in distillation pipe and is collected in storage. The rum obtained in this way is 50 percent.

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“No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive.”  Mahatma Gandhi

A natural miracle like the Carbet Falls in the midst of the Caribbean rainforest offers a lot of ways to develop key competences. The enormous biodiversity there compared to a variety of cultures underlines vividly Gandhi’s thought. By re-establishing Indian culture he initiated and reached the independence of his country against a British culture that wanted to be exclusive. By teaching his people to be aware of their own culture and to practice it he reached an enormous aim with peaceful means.

We constantly have to work to keep that idea alive. Don’t forget that Gandhi’s country was split and he himself was killed because of cultural, in that case religious exclusiveness.

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Session 7

Today our lesson was held in the island of Basse Terre in the site of the three waterfalls Chute de Carbet.

The Waterfalls are localed near the village of Saint-Sauver, they are even mentioned in the logbook of Christopher Columbus.

At the entrance of the village there is in fact a bust of the Italian explorer and navigator.

We walked along the path to reach the magnificent waterfalls immersed in a lush and colorful river forest.

We discussed about how a visit with the students, to the Falls, can be an opportunity to enhance the 8 competencies.

Afterwards we went to visit an important distillery of rhum, a national drink for the inhabitants of Guadeloupe.

This drink is made of sugar cane using an ancient method made up of various phases: extraction of sugar, fermentation and distillation.

Drinking a glass of Rhum is a joy for life!

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Today we enjoyed the gorgeous scenery of the Carbet Falls (Les Chutes du Carbet).
Carbet Falls are near the Soufriere volcano in Basse Terre. Basse-terre is the mountainous part of Guadeloupe and is made of volcanic mountains covered with rainforest.
There are 3 rainfalls, fall 2 is the easiest to get to, taking a light 30-minute walk. It's very impressive.
The biodiversity of plants in the rainforest is staggering. The Guadeloupe rainforest has a lot of species of plant, and a single tree in the rainforest may contain more species of epiphyte (plants that grow on other plants) than most countries.
Epiphytes grow on other plants for physical support but at the same time are an important source of food for many species.
The intermingling of trees and plants looks like the human biodiversity which characterizes Guadeloupe and the entire world as well.
“Look and see
The Sun rising from the river
Nature's miracle once more
Will light the world
But this light
Is not for those men
Still lost in
An old black shadow
Won't you help me to believe
That they will see
A day
A brighter day
When all the shadows
Will fade away
That day I'll cry
That I believe” (R. Ortolani)