Education around the world

“ Ca bouge a la ferme” ( “It moves to the farm”)

My aunt is a young primary teacher, she always wanted to beeing one. She really like the nature, and know what is happening around us. So in her only second year of teaching, she had a new project: teaching to kids in relation with the nature. Show to the kids that everything at school could be related with nature.

Beeing teacher in the classrooms during two years were kind of awful for her, she found that the classrooms lacked of fresh air for kids who need to move, to see and to express things to understand them. She thinks that the best way to teach is “move much , observe reality and give free rein to his creativity and imagination”.

Her project was finally realized this September. With another teacher in her school, they found a farmer who accepted to lend his farm every wednesday for the primary school kids (From 5 years old to 12 years old). It is at least a good start but their dream is to teaching outdoors, creating a farm school for everyday. Florie my aunt says in an article: “ Caterpillar offers a gateway to math. Scrutinized from every angle , it is a subject all found the drawing. Besides it can be a presentation , which will be worked on written and oral expression. For them , the goal is not to compete with the public school " which works fine for most children" but to " offer something to those who need to learn by touch, the concrete , sensory . "Meanwhile teach outdoors , they hope to expand the schedules of Wednesdays.”

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The project is constituted of 38 Wednesday in the whole school year. Every time the theme of the day is different. Every week the kids have to sign in for the next Wednesday, because for the moment only 18 kids can participate per week and for the moment every Wednesdays were completed. The days are separated in three parts.The first part is animated by the farmer. She teach different aspects of her job to the children. She is teaching how she has to work everyday, what kind of problems she has to resolve with animals, like problems with moles, for example. The kids are also working and helping the farmer, they learn how to treat livestock, grow fruit and vegetables to the rhythm of the seasons, how to wash and cook them, etc. She explains everything she is doing and then she invites the kids to try and help her. They also want to buy an henhouse with about twenty hens to allow the children to follow the evolution weeks after weeks.

Then, they spend the afternoon in the forest, with the goal of pedagogy by nature. Afternoons will take place closer to nature in the nearby forest , where the "green classroom" will be develop a stamm of branches with the help of forest guards. Then the last part of the day are the snacks, but natural product directly from the farm, such as fruits, fresh milk and so on.

 

But the ultimate goal is to create a farm school. Their ideas came from North of Europe, like Germany or Sweden where this kind of education is pretty developed. The new association “ Ca bouge a la ferme” (“It moves to the farm”) gets a little help from the part of the swiss confederation concerned with nature, and also is in collaboration with ONG “The forest trust”, to especially find contacts for their magical project. My aunt is not the only one in Switzerland, some schools also have similar projects. Around Geneva, a school decided, after a demand of two teachers, to give the possibility to the 4-6 years old kids to have the major part of the school time outside. Both teachers have planned a trailer in the event of bad weather. And their goal is to discover and transmit to kids the love of nature, to show them how to respect the nature.

Another project in Geneva in a daycare which welcomes kids from 2 to 5 years old was carried out last school year. The daycare is in full drill and they are mostly outside, if it rains, children can shelter under a tarp. It is really rare that they stay inside during the day.   

I like the idea of having school outside the most of the time. I feel that kids learn more and easier in an environment where they can experience by themselve. They can be directly connected with the nature and I think it is the best way to really know how the nature works. In the classrooms, the kids learn the theories or the explanations by heart only to get good grades without being really interest. And I think that if every school would have one program with some parts outside, we wouldn’t have so many climate and nature problems. Because they would learn how to protect and respect the nature since they’re really young.