Last Week in Costa Rica.....

I cannot believe that this is my last week in Costa Rica. I will admit at times I had the feelings of wanting the trip to be over but that was only when I was struggling in my Spanish classes. Other than that I have been learning a lot about the culture here as well as myself. We visited a school this week that had a very interesting outlook on their way of teaching the children. The school was the Cloud Forest School and that is exactly what it is, a school in the clouds and forest. The children are very involved in keeping their environment healthy and hopefully repopulating the forest to what it use to be. In each classroom there were ways in which the kids were giving back to nature whether that meant that they were using their leftovers from lunch for compost or they were building things to improve their school by using the resources that they had. While we were getting the tour of the school, we learned that they kids are always doing things outside in the forest and every grade level has their own row in the garden. I can remember as a kid that I would always look out the window just hoping that the teacher would either let us go play on the playground or they would take us out to teach the lesson outside. Here the kids are always getting outside and they have a bunch of different trails that they can take hikes on that lead to other classrooms where the teacher can teach along the way and have a reflection at the end of it all. I really want to find a way to put this into my teaching because I feel as though I would have the focus of the students a lot better just because they were able to go out and get some energy out. Then at the same time they would be learning and getting benefits from the hike. I enjoyed the visit and being able to see yet again another way of teaching children and being able to learn from the experience in ways that I can improve my teaching.