LAST week during midterm, teachers from Moyderwell Mercy School travelled to Kopaqvaguar in Iceland to observe the Icelandic Education system and to find ways to benefit their own school in Tralee.

As part of the Erasmus programme, the teachers spent five days in Horduvallaskoli School where they gained first-hand experience for their “Healthy Bodies Healthy Minds” project.

The school’s Erasmus+ project entitled “Healthy Minds” is aimed at improving the overall Wellbeing of the school’s pupils and staff. Iceland, Italy and Norway are the countries Moyderwell teachers will visit to job shadow over the 18 month long project.

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Teacher Karen O’Connor said; “the objective is to foster in the child the sense of care and respect for himself/herself and others. We also hope to help children, families, and staff develop resilience and positive life-coping skills.  We will be researching and studying programmes and methods used in these countries.  We are looking at SPHE/Wellbeing programmes, Home-School links and methods used in other schools with the view to reviewing and improving our P.E and SPHE policies.

“We’ve gained valuable and useful experience on these trips”, said Eoin Sayers, the 6th class teacher. “We have seen that in many ways, we have as good if not better a school system as in Nordic countries. We have a very broad curriculum, where children can experience many different aspects of life. Nordic countries tend to be very narrow in their educational focus, especially on reading and maths.  We have much larger classes and we integrate children with different needs far more than they do. We are matching those countries in literacy and numeracy targets.”

Teacher Laura Daly added; “the next focus for us is mental health and wellbeing, and again the Nordic countries are held up as good exemplars. We have created links with those schools and the children write letters to each other throughout the year. My class did a joint project with a school in Sweden where we used Scratch computer programming to create games and we swapped them.  We also have had skype conversations with the schools.”

Through previous Erasmus+ projects, Moyderwell Mercy has developed and maintained links with partner schools in Sweden, Finland and Norway for job shadowing and team teaching and these joint ventures have been extremely successful.