Wednesday, June 25, 2008

An elementary school visit

Today we all checked out of our rooms and then stored our luggage for the day while we visited an elementary school called Fridtjof Nansen Schule. This was quite a school to visit because they are known as a very successful school, even though they have lots of different nationalities present in their school. Also, this school has new ergonomic furniture and some very innovative physical activity centers throughout the school. The school is trying many innovative ideas like having kids be very active through the school day. For instance, if a child needs to move during a math lesson, he/she could grab a timer and go and exercise in the hallway for 3 minutes. I visited a second grade classroom and found it to be very similar to an American second grade class, except that they were working on the multiplication and division facts for 7. That is perhaps a little more advanced than most of our second grade curriculum.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

HI this is AshleyJ, about how many kids are there per classrooms ? bye

Mark Heiden said...

I counted 21 in the second grade classroom, and about 23 in the 4th grade classroom. The school had about 340 kids I think, so it was quite a bit smaller than BSE. Still, it had very nice classroom size. Also, teachers loop with their kids for 4 years there, so they have the same 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grade teacher.

How was France?