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Grunnskóli Grundarfjarðar, Iceland

ICELAND

Grunnskoli Grundarfjardar

Grunnskóli Grundarfjarðar is a primary/secondary school with 96 pupils (6-16 years) and a kindergarten department for five year olds. There are 12 teachers, plus principal and vice-principal. The school is situated on the north of Snæfellsnespeninsula, in western part of Iceland, by Breiðafjordur. It is full of history and beautiful nature. Kirkjufell is Grundarfjordur’s iconic landmark, situated just by the village. Grundarfjordur´s main industry is fishing. The town it self is relatively young but stands on an age-long tradition of small scale fishing in small rowboats from the local
farmsteads. It was also the site of a bustling French fishing outpost in the middle of 19th century. Like most communities in Iceland we have a close relationship with the sea. Breidafjordur is one of the richest fishing grounds near Iceland and has in ages past been called Icelands food chest. It has rich spawning grounds for cod, pollock amongst others. Most prominent of other seafood is scallop, blue mussel, and kelp. It is also the spawning grounds for many species of seabirds such as auks, gannets and puffins. This rich fjord is also the habitat for harbour and greyseals, dolphins and orcas. Our little town of 800 people is an open and welcoming community and most people know everyone by name. It has, in addition to the primary school, a kindergarten, secondary school and a music school. Our schools motto is ambition, cooperation, responsibility and joy. It is run on the principles of inclusion and multiculturalism which has been adopted in the national curriculum. Our students learn
English from the age of six and Danish from the age of ten. About 10% of our students are second gen immigrants, mostly from Poland, who grow up bilingual and learn Polish from the age of six instead of Danish. We routinely use our local environment as a basis for projects in different subjects such as arts, history, biology and ICT. In our school we have a good and ambitious ICT team, who are always looking for new ways and ideas to use technology in teaching. The key persons in charge of running the project will be the principal and a history teacher, who is also ICT and arts teacher,
and an English teacher, but the whole school community will be involved in the project as well. We would very much like to share with other schools our nature,our culture, folktales and music. We have no experience in projects like this and are looking forward to it. Hopefully this is just the beginning in our European journey. The Key people in this project is history, Art and ICT teacher Sigurrós Sandra Bergvinsdóttir, Principal Sigurður Gíslí Guðjónsson and english teacher Helga María Jóhannesdóttir.

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Primary School no 1 in Ustka

POLAND

Szkola Podstawowa nr1 im.kpt. Leonida Teligi

Primary School no 1 is situated in a new western part of a small town Ustka. Our town is located on the Slowinski Coast, at the mouth of the Slupia River to the Baltic Sea. It is a port town, tourist resort with beautiful sea beaches. Inhabitants of Ustka have been intensively engaged in fishing for many centuries. There are 50 teachers and 502 students at the age from 6 to 14. Our school is characterized by a very good relationship between community groups, friendly atmosphere for all, mutual respect, maintaining traditions and respect for national symbols. The school helps students to
believe in themselves, motivates to work, fairly assesses and delivers a high quality of teaching. The school takes into account the needs of all students, including those gifted and less able. Moreover, it helps students to discover and develop their talents, promotes their achievements and offers a wide variety of compulsory and optional tasks. Our school is safe and caring space where no child is anonymous. Every employee takes careful consideration of our students. We have a psychologist, a
school therapist and a speech therapist. They co-operate with all teachers and parents. They also help to overcome students’ problems and work efficiently with children with special needs like ADHD, autism, dyslexia, reading defect, sight or hearing problems. We would like to involve these children in the project in as many innovative ways as possible. The key person in charge of running the project will be the English teacher. However, all school staff- especially other English, ICT, Science, Geography, Maths, History, Art and D.T. teachers are experienced in European projects (5 Comenius and Erasmus+ projects). Teachers, who will be the key people in charge of running the project, besides the coordinator, are other English teachers and ICT teacher. We want to involve in the project as many children, parents and local authorities as possible. We won the title “The school is open to multiculturalism” and we are involved in the competition called “We are digitally secure school” in which children use English and ICT skills. We would like to implement research, innovation and ICT for presentation of a topic in a new project. We would also like to share knowledge with students from different countries and exchange information on different topics and we are open to almost every subject. We have very well- equipped Language and ICT labs at school that allows our students to communicate with partners involved in the project. What’s important that all our children learn English language from the age of 6. Most of them also learn German. Our school has a new, very well-equipped Science lab, a big gym, a modern playground with a sports field. All of these make our school possible to work on wide variety of topics and subjects. We are able to create a movie, a website, a blog, an e- book, an album or an app through which we would present our given subject to the others.