Mind the gap

I've found a nice website.
How can we encourage children to discover, explore and investigate their local environment?
This project is sponsored by the European Union with support of several organizations from UK, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia and the Netherlands.

Mind the Gap helps you learn about the world around you through a series of fun, free and curriculum linked activities. You can explore where your food comes from, how to build sustainable homes, take community decisions and much more.
Explore the Mind the Gap website and discover all the exciting activities just by clicking on the images above to choose your topic. Each activity is clearly laid out and includes a special set of teachers notes.

Assignments based on M.I.

Three files with 50 different assignments.

All intelligences will be challenged.

On request available in English and German.

Epstein's Framework of Six Types of Involvement

The framework of six types of involvement helps educators develop more comprehensive programs of school-family-community partnerships.

Each type of involvement includes many different practices of partnership. Each type has particular challenges that must be met in order to involve all families, and each type requires redefinitions of some basic principles of involvement. Finally, each type leads to different results for students, parents and teachers
Although all schools may use the framework of six types of involvement as a guide, each school must choose practices that will help achieve important goals and meet the needs of its students and families.

TYPE 1: PARENTING: Assist families with parenting and child-rearing skills, understanding child and adolescent development, and setting home conditions that support children as students at each age and grade level. Assist schools in understanding families.
TYPE 2: COMMUNICATING: Communicate with families about school programs and student progress through effective school-to-home and home-to-school communications.
TYPE 3: VOLUNTEERING: Improve recruitment, training, work, and schedules to involve families as volunteers and audiences at the school or in other locations to support students and school programs.
TYPE 4: LEARNING AT HOME: Involve families with their children in learning activities at home, including homework and other curriculum-linked activities and decisions.
TYPE 5: DECISION MAKING: Include families as participants in school decisions, governance, and advocacy through PTA/PTO, school councils, committees, and other parent organizations.
TYPE 6: COLLABORATING WITH THE COMMUNITY: Coordinate resources and services for families, students, and the school with businesses, agencies, and other groups, and provide services to the community.

From:
‘School, family and community partnerships: Your handbook for action’
Dr. Joyce Epstein, John Hopkins University, Baltimore

Teamwork

In the daily life one has to work with a lot of different people. Nothing is better than to start this teamspirit at school. At a Dalton school children can make the choice to work together with another or with a group.
In this way they learn to explain things to each other.

“By self activity the pupil has to find for himself, or together with others, strategies of solving problems set to him. So the teacher does not start with ample explanations”. H.P.

Dalton is visualizing processes. From the Kindergarten age we give children insight in the process by using lots of materials : assignment boards or formulars, the day rhythm scedule etc.
Learning to solve problems is using the time during the delayed attention, a period in which the teacher is not available for any question of the children. But the classroom is arranged following the principles of class-management. A clear class arrangement where children are able and allowed to find their own way.

“The resistance, generated in the child by the old machinery to the process of learning, can be transformated into interest and industry as soon as the pupil is released to carry out the educational programme in his own way. Freedom and responsibility together perfom the miracle”.

“The Dalton plan is a way to wake up a new response from the child’s nature by inviting him to undertake the job in a way that appeals to his natural desire to learn things in his own way and even in his own time”.
Helen Parkhurst

Dalton publications in the past

Interesting to see how many Dalton publications were available in 1926. All edited by the Dalton Association, 35 Cornwall Gardens, London S.W.

Dalton International

Dalton International looks across borders. International contacts are useful to reflect on your own situation. In co-operation with teachers in other countries we discover that we speak the same educational language even without speaking the same language. Countries are exporting goods, but in education we exchange good expertise. And that kind of exchange is exactly one of the most important targets of Dalton International. Dalton International wants to stimulate the innovation of the Dalton education by international exchange of expertise. International Dalton conferences give that possibility. But a conference is not the only platform. Training of school staffs, offering Dalton courses, publishing of articles, the exchange of teachers and students, organizing workshops and seminars are also possibilities to improve Dalton education on an international level. After a training period Dalton International can give teachers an official Dalton Certificat and we can nominate schools that have followed a Dalton training process for the predicate of "International Dalton School". Several of these activities took place in Lodz-Warsaw-Ostrowiec/Poland, Unstruttal/Germmany, Dakar/Senegal, Wels and Vienna/Austria, Zwolle/The Netherlands. A next international conference will take place in October in Poland.

Dalton Seminar 'Europaschule' Vienna