Day 3 Denmark
On Thursday March 7th, we returned for our final school visit to Dybbol-Skolen. Our first lesson that morning was a Danish lesson with Year 6 – similar age to a 6th class/1st years class. They asked us a lot of questions first to find out all about us. Their Danish lesson started with an audio of a sci-fi book that they are reading. They had to answer questions about the characters and then they used menti.com which is an app you can use to get everyone to type in answers and they come up on the teacher’s whiteboard. Once again all the students had phones or laptops to use in the classroom. One boy Oscar even showed us his photo of his bearded lizard Spike from his phone! Once the teacher discovered it was in his pocket he quickly popped it back in the storage cupboards where they stay for the day unless they are being used in the classroom. We felt again that the pace of the lessons were much slower than ours. The students write in pencil but rarely write in their copies.
The next lesson we observed was a Religion class in Year 2 – same age as our 2nd class pupils. There are many nationalities in the school but state and religion are separate. So the children were learning about Creation. They learned about it from the Islam and biblical perspectives last week and today they learned about it from the Big Bang scientific perspective. They watched a video and spoke about what they had seen. In this classroom, we noticed that all the Maths equipment that a teacher uses was actually stuck by Velcro on the board. Another thing that the school uses for children who find it hard to focus or who need some sensory stimulation was a strip of Velcro stuck to the side of the pupil’s desk.
Our final class was a Danish class with Year 3 – same age as our 3rd class. They spent the lesson trying to find Danish words from a long list of letters. Once again, we felt the pace was very different to our classrooms.
Michael Jacobsen, the Headmaster, met us for a final review of the trip and once again treated us to beautiful open sandwiches - Smorrebrod – one especially nice with roast beef, crispy fried onions, grated horseradish, a remoulade made from mayonnaise, curry powder, Greek yoghurt and topped off with gherkins. Truly delicious!
Michael spoke about inspectors and how they really don’t have inspectors to inspect teachers. There is a teaching union for the teachers and another one for Principals. National and local standardised tests are done and reported on at the end of year for each class.
Overall, we enjoyed the visit to these schools, affirming us in the work we do and giving us many different ideas to support our pupils. Regarding languages, we believe Danish children are at a greater advantage as they speak Danish, English and German. We also thought that the children were at a greater advantage when it comes to technology as they are using their phones and mobiles in school. We were a little surprised by this as we didn’t see phones in use in any other school we visited across Europe. We especially feel that the students in Denmark have more varied subjects because they learn cooking, sewing and woodwork from about 7/8 years. We would love to see these subjects in our school! We do feel that the pace of our lessons and teaching lends itself to our style of education but we loved the fact that there are specialist teachers in different subjects.
Erasmus is a wonderful opportunity with the aim of opening minds and broadening horizons and we certainly feel that this happened for us.
Culturally, Sonderborg is a beautiful place, with lots of interesting history and a fabulous harbour area which would be even nicer in the summer. The food is gorgeous here too but it is very expensive also! The Danish language is very difficult. They have 29 letters in their alphabet and the words are hard to pronounce! It is not a phonetic language!
Our final visit was to Copenhagen where we got to see the famous Little Mermaid statue. It appears much larger in the tourist photos that we see when Copenhagen is featured but worth the 3km walk nonetheless! We passed by Rosenberg Castle which was built to hold Denmark’s greatest treasures. We took a walk to the beautiful harbour that is often the main picture for Copenhagen! And we passed by the famous Tivoli Gardens. Copenhagen is an expensive city but it is definitely worth a visit!
Thanks for reading about our trip! CLICK HERE to see our Day 3 video!