Critical and Creative Thinking
The Way Ahead
Project meeting in Slovenia
DAY 1, Monday, 17th October
We welcomed our guests with our opening ceremony, showed them a short presentation of our school, and gave them a tour of it as well. We also made a presentation on Maribor and Slovenia, where we learned more about our guests, and they learned more about us. We also had a workshop where the students worked in pairs and presented creative solutions to local problems that the youth face today. At the end of the day, we all went out to dinner and got to know each other a little better.
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DAY 2, Tuesday, 18th October
Today we visited a specialized organization for children with special needs, seeing how they work in school and learning about what they do on the daily basis. The first thing on the schedule was a presentation of the school by one of the employees, then we were split into mixed groups where our students and teachers worked together with teachers and students from other countries. There were many different workshops, for example, a classroom in the woods, a class in pyrography art, helping the students at school bake Halloween cookies, baking apples filled with walnuts, and some of our students also made a witch den in the main hall of the school as a Halloween surprise for the special needs students. After the workshops finished we all gathered in the atrium of the school and ate the food that was prepared (Halloween cookies, baked apples, and roasted chestnuts) while getting to know the E+ students and teachers as well as the employees and students of the specialized organization. After that, the employees took us on a tour of Dom Antona Skale – a place where the students who live far away from the school stay during the week, they do not have a way of coming to school every day. After the tour of their living quarters was done, we had lunch and then took the E+ students on a hike to Pohorje – the highest hill in Maribor. In the evening, we hosted an official dinner for the teachers and the principal of our school.
DAY 3, Wednesday, 19th October
Today we all went on a day trip to the capital of Slovenia – Ljubljana. In the morning, when we got there, we first visited a school museum. In the museum, we got to experience a Slovenian school in the past and we even had a whole 45-minute class, all of it set in the past. Then we visited the city gallery in Ljubljana where we got the opportunity to create our own personalized logo using an old Chinese game where you use different shapes to create designs. We got a task to create a lot of different things, like the initials of our name, a coffee shop logo, a rose, we even made a stop motion movie using an application on our phones. We also got a tour of the gallery where we saw a lot of different art and art styles depicting art from different time periods of our country. After the gallery, we walked to the Ljubljana castle, the students had an option of either walking to the top or taking the elevator. When we got to the top of the castle, we were able to see the entire city of Ljubljana and even experienced a beautiful sunset.
DAY 4, Thursday, 20th October
In the morning we had a presentation about bicycles and the fact that bicycles are not used as much in the world as they used to be, and we were motivated to use our bikes more instead of other gas-powered transport. The students were divided into groups and each group was given a broken bike to fix. Every bike had the same problem and the students used communication and teamwork to overcome them and fix the bikes. Every group managed to finish their tasks successfully. After lunch, the students were again divided into groups and each group got one Slovenian student, while all the teachers were in their own group and they were tasked with making a presentation about Slovenia without Google, and they present it to others, including the professors. They told interesting things about Slovenia and what they liked about it most and their genuine thoughts about our country. In the afternoon we talked about Slovenian mobility and our thoughts about it, planning the Czech mobility in mid-March 2023. The last moments were spent exchanging contacts before departure.
