ERASMUS+ 1st International meeting - VAASA
As part of the Erasmus+ Involve Me & I Learn project our teacher attended the 1st International meeting in Vaasa, Finland. On 4th November 2014 she, as well as her colleagues from Iceland, Spain, Greece and Italy, arrived in Vaasa, where they got to know each other for the first time. During the following two days they had a lot of meetings, where they set the foundations for our project and arranged all the details. Unfortunately, the meeting was held two weeks after the participating schools got the confirmation from their national agencies that the project had been approved, so they could not take any students with them due to such short notice.
The teachers also visited the Terranova museum, presenting the Kvarken archipelago, which was chosen in 2006 to become Finland's first natural heritage site on UNESCO's list of World Heritage Sites. They also attended a concert at their school and were quite surprised by their education system. The school, named Vaasan lyseon lukioon, is a bilingual school (Finnish and Swedish) with a totally different system from the one in Slovenia. The school year is divided into five periods that last about seven weeks each. At the end of each period they have an exam week, where they have one exam per day. Throughout the year they can choose different subjects – students decide by themselves which subjects they want to study at what time, but they have some restrictions (they have some obligatory subjects and some optional ones). Another interesting thing is also that they can have different teachers for the same subject in one year (e.g. if they have to choose Maths two or three times per year, then they might get three different teachers or one teacher twice).
At the end of the project the teachers realised that one of the mistakes they had made right from the start was that they did not take any students with them, because it would be great for some of the students to see Vaasa and already meet other students in Finland.
If you want to get more information on our project, visit our blog.