Leonardo da Vinci mobility project Nr. LLP-LdV-IVT-2011-LT0501
,,Through mobility to flexible teaching”
Leonardo da Vinci partnership project Nr. LLP-LdV-PRT-2010-LT-0161
,,Automobility – expansion pack”
Evaldas Andrukaitis, Vaidas Dabravolskis, Aurimas Paleckis (Vilkija School of Agriculture)
Savo Consortium for Education, Savo Vocational College, Kuopio, Finland
The training placement period: 05-05-2012/26-05-2012
Evaldas Andriukaitis, Aurimas Paleckis and Vaidas Dabravalskis’s impressions of the
training placement in Finland
At the beginning of May, 2012, we went for the training placement to Finland with
two students from KBPC and Marijampole professional preparation centre, accompanied by KBPC
profession teacher Vygantas Zinevicius. We knew that this would be the last training placement of
our project. On the first day of our journey to Finland, we arrived to Tallinn by car. On the second
day we continued our journey and took the ferry over to Helsinki. Savo Vocational College is
situated in Kuopio town, which is 460 km from Helsinki. In Kuopio, we were greeted by an English
teacher and international connections coordinator Irja Nenola. She told us about the school,
showed us the way to the living quarters, from which the schools workshop is 200 meters away,
and the department, situated in Silinjarvi town, which is 26 km away. The first day, we were
introduced to the mechanic department director – Harri Hakkola. He introduced us the plan of our
whole placement, shoved us the schools workshop, the town and gave us copies of the plans.
Together with the practical teaching (two days per week), we had English language and physics
classes. These lessons we had together with finish students. Physic’s lessons were different from
those at our school. We didn’t use any textbooks, and did physics tasks separately. The right
answers were later placed on the board, and the teacher explained them in English. At the English
classes, we communicated in English: we talked about ourselves, our town, school. Savo
Vocational college English teacher told us about Finland, Kuopio town, the most commonly visited
places.
Savo Vocational College has about 5600 students. There are many specialties, but
we were most interested in the transport sector. The lodgings were made not only for theory, but
also practical for studying. We were amazed by the teaching equipment, and the car painting
saloon in Silinjarvi town. We worked 8 hours per day, and the rest of the day and the weekends
we relaxed. We got to know Kuopio town and its surroundings. We visited an old car museum and
the so called Mammoth museum. Here we saw a huge exhibition of the finish wildlife and the
main accent – a mammoth. We visited Kuopio swimming pool, Kusama town, which is in the
mountains. There was a lot of snow here, so we decided to go sledging. We really enjoyed the fun
park in Tampere town, and spent the whole day there. On the last week of our placement we
played a friendly game of football and basketball with Savo Vocational College students. We didn’t
seem to do well at football, but we won the basketball match.  At the end of the third week of
our placement, we met the teachers of Savo Vocational College, discussed the impressions, and
answered the questions. We were given the Europass mobility documents and certificates of this
placement. A trip to Lithuania was waiting for us. When we arrived to the capital of Finland, we
were amazed by its beauty. In the evening, we took the ferry “VIKING LINE” to Tallinn, and on
Saturday (the 26th of May) we came back to Lithuania where we were greeted by our families. We
really enjoyed this project. It gave us the chance to improve our knowledge and practical skills
abroad working with modern car parameter calculating, malfunction determination, technical
safety and repairing equipment, car body painting technologies. We got to extend our foreign
language (English) knowledge, communication and job in other culture and international
teamwork skills.