Day 131-girls' schoolwork

   May 14-We are nearing the end of the school year, so I thought that it might be an appropriate time to talk about the girls' experiences at the Varmaland school.  Besides, it mostly snowed all day today, so we stayed indoors and did not do much of anything exciting. 
   Overall, the girls have really enjoyed going to school here.  Because their classmates speak English so well and since there is more free time to socialize during the school day than there is in the States, it has been relatively easy for the girls to strike up a few friendships.  When we ask about their school day, we often hear about them playing around with their friends, so it is good that they were able to socialize so easily.

The front license plate has Joslyn's initials.

   The emphasis placed on arts, crafts, and physical activities, such as acting, P.E., and swimming, still amazes us.  As might be expected, these are some of girls' favorite parts of the school day. Joslyn is particularly fond of her wood-working class and brings home a new project every couple of weeks.  Last month she cut out and painted a jewelry hanger to look like our cat Frisky back in Gunnison. This craft item will probably be even more meaningful for her, because her teacher and classmates burned their names and a message into the back of it.  Most recently, she made a wooden car and a butter knife, which we immediately put to use.  Alex's craft class is sewing and knitting.  She has become very efficient at knitting and can knit a pair of socks in a couple days if she puts her mind to it.  Recently, she also made a pair of pajama pants and a purse for herself. 

   These types of classes seem to do more than just teach the subject matter.  They also encourage students to develop certain personality traits, such as perseverance, self-confidence, creativity, and personal responsibility.  For instance, Joslyn's class is set loose in the woodworking class with saws, wood-burning tools, and other implements of destruction, and they manage to come away unharmed with beautiful creations.  P.E. is more free-form here and games like dodgeball are still quite common as well.  Being one of the smaller kids in her class, Joslyn is not particularly enamored by this game, but she has learned how to deal with adversity!  These examples highlight a larger-scale difference between Icelandic and American child-rearing.  Icelandic parents today are much more similar to our parents a generation ago.  They give kids more freedom and expect them to learn from their mistakes.  This contrasts with the growing tendency among American parents to hover over their kids, to schedule their lives, and to try to protect them from all dangers.  

   With the copious amounts of free time and the time spent doing arts and crafts and physical activities, it should come as no surprises that the amount of school time spent dealing with more academic subjects is less than that in the States.  Initially, the girls spent most of this classroom time learning Icelandic instead of studying these other subjects, because instruction was obviously in Icelandic.  More recently, they have begun to learn some science, math, and history in the classroom as well and we have begun to see that the Varmaland curriculum lags the curriculum the girls have had in Gunnison.  

   Math is probably the easiest subject to use in a comparison between Varmaland and Gunnison.  When Joslyn left Gunnison back in December, she was doing the same math as the rest of her 4th grade class.  At Varmaland, she is in a class composed of 4th and 5th graders, so when she started learning math, Gróa, her teacher, gave her the math book for 4th graders.  Subsequently, as Joslyn has demonstrated to Gróa that she has seen these math subjects before, Gróa has steadily advanced her, until now Joslyn and one other 5th grader are doing the most advanced math in the class.  Our general impression is that this comparison holds true for most subjects and for all three of the kids as well: the local curriculum appears to lag behind Gunnison's curriculum by about a year.

   We met with the kids' teachers before leaving Gunnison to find out the subject matter their classmates would be learning while we were in Iceland, in case the curriculum did not match up.  Since it is not matching up particularly well, the girls have been doing some work at home when they have free time to keep up with their Gunnison classmates.  All of their math work is on-line, so it has been easy for them to log on and solve the exact same math problems as their American classmates.  Both have also been practicing their writing by posting to their blog occasionally.  We copied the appropriate chapters from the Alex's science and social studies books and brought them over as pdfs and she has nearly completed reading them as well.  Joslyn is also still working on a report about the Icelandic horse that mirrors a report her classmates completed a couple months ago.  Overall, I think that they are learning enough that they will not be behind their classmates when they return to the Gunnison school system in the fall.  The hardest part will probably be reintegrating with their friends (reverse culture shock) and refamiliarizing themselves with the more academically intensive American education system.