School goes on for four hours, each morning, from Monday to Friday. In the afternoon, the 21 pupils meet their younger schoolmates from the kindergarten. This is the Finnish pre-elementary class:
As in the kindergarten, the "class" occupies several rooms, among which the children get about freely.
The difference is that they also dispose of a huge table and school material: a ring binder containing their works, and writing, cutting and pasting material. An educator, Leea Isotalo, shows me an exercice book brought by a child from another town.
She adds that at Arabia, these exercice books are not used. The teachers’ approach is to arouse the children’s interests.
Leea read the children a story, Joen Laulu – the song of the river. They found it captivating. The children learnt the songs, they drew the characters, they made the puppets and settings. Finally, they will offer a public show on the 6th of June, during the summer Party.
Just like the other teachers of Arabia, Leea thinks her role is to organise the framework into which her pupils evolve. It’s up to them to react and take initiatives. Adults are not there to pull them, or push or drag them. Finnish pupils learn straightaway that they aren’t here to passively wait and obey, but it’s up to them to act.
Leea shows me a large cupboard: "First, it was just a storage cupboard. But we noticed children liked to hide in it. So we emptied it and put a little table and chairs in it, as well as pieces of nets and fabric hanging from the ceiling, giving a mysterious aspect to it…"
At eleven o’clock, the whole kindergarten attend a musical session: three girls and a boy have been preparing a show for a few days. Here is the occasion to observe that they wrote their programme and that they use it… →
Before lunch, Leea Isotalo gets onto PISA, without knowing that PISA is precisely the subject that brought me to Finland: "If we get better results at PISA, this is mostly because of the work carried out here."
At the age of fifteen, young Fins are between one and a half and two years ahead of young French of the same age in literacy, mathematics and science. I’m tempted to believe, like Leea, that much is at stake at an early age.
Thanks to all the Freelang translators
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