Ansó 29 September
by Isabel Isherwood - 14:45 on 29 September 2016
Some school stuff…
Iona and Rowan have been at school for three weeks now, and are beginning to settle in. Size-wise, the school is very similar to Lochaline, with I think 26 pupils at the moment, The difference here is that the school takes children from ages 3 to 14, staring with ‘infantíl’ which is from age 3 to 5, Primaria from 6 to 12 and ‘ESO’ which is the first two years of high school - the local high school is in Jaca which is considered too far to travel until the kids are a bit older. Primaria is made up of six year-groups, of which the lower four are in a class together, and the top two are in a class with the ESO children.
Rural schools here are grouped into a ‘CRA’ which shares resources including teachers. This seems to be quite a clever system which allows the schools in the CRA access to teachers specialising in every subject on the curriculum. Iona’s class teacher is Arancha who specialises in Language (Spanish, obviously!), Music and Science; Rowan’s teacher is Emilia, whose specialities are English and Maths. These teachers move between classes to teach their specialities. Then they have additional teachers who come in several times a week to do French, PE, Social Sciences (which seems to be mostly Geography and History) and Art. They have a timetable with hour-long slots for each subject; this appeals very strongly to Iona who likes the sense of being ‘grown up’ and also the feeling that she is learning a lot of different things.
School timings have taken a bit of getting used to. For the first two and a half weeks they went to school for half days only, starting at 9.30am and finishing at 1.30pm; this will apparently be repeated in June. Starting this week, and for the rest of the year, they do full days, starting at 10am and finishing at 5pm, with an hour and a half lunch break from 1.30 until 3pm. Except on Wednesdays when they finish at 1pm and have the afternoon free…… (which I hadn’t realised – with the result that Iona and Rowan spent half an hour sitting on the doorstep yesterday).
The girls are coming home for lunch most days, but tomorrow they are going to try staying for school lunch. We shall see how this goes; they are both deeply unadventurous when it comes to food so Spanish lunch might not be to their taste (Scottish lunch wasn’t either, to be fair). It makes for a long day too…..
I haven't taken any pictures of the school yet so here is a male black redstart that Jake photographed from his office window!
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