First day at Sønderskov-Skolen

 Today was our first contact with the Sønderborg school. Sønderskov-Skolen is a achool that teaches from zero grade to nineth grade, that is, from six-year-olds to 16-year-olds. Their organization is quite different from ours: these grades are organized in three-year cycles, so that the same teachers have the same groups of students from zero grade to grade three, then another group of teachers has them from grade four to grade six and finally one last group of teachers have them from grade seven to grade nine. These groups of teachers are called teams and are made up of between six and eight teachers, so that the same teacher teaches subjects from various fields. Even so, sometimes they require a specialist, for example in German, who leaves another team to teach German classes in that other team.

This kind of organisation is the key, I think, to let them work with project based learning. Projects are created by the teachers in a team, working altogether; and they are a real team! Each team makes a funny poster of themselves, showing their faces, but “dressed up” like superheroes or like characters fron Harry Potter’s world.

Another astonishing thing is that the school is large, so large... The building is huge, so they have a lot of space as well as resources: an arts and crafts atelier with sewing machines, for example, an oven to make ceramics... And, obviously, the school library is very big too It has been growing up along the years (the school was built in the forties) and now it’s a nice space where every class goes once a week (in their timetables, there is one lesson assigned in the library).

Well, tomorrow we will continue learning more about how the library works.

Today, I’d just like to point out that students seem to be very comfortable at classes. In fact, they can walk out of the classroom to make tasks assigned by their teachers, so you can find them in the corridor, in the library..., and most of them are weating no shoes, just like if they were at home!