For our study we need to do a project, Schools on the Move, with different targed groups. There were tree targed groups (childeren, young adults and adults) that did two different days given by the students. There were 8 instructors for 60 childeren, 6 instructors for 40 young adults and 4 instructors for 20 adults. We had one week to prepair the first days and one week to prepair the second day. We write a short text about the different targed groups.

Children

We worked in a group of 8 instructors with 60 children of 12 years old. We set some goals for the activity days as gaining communication skills, social skills and team work skills. All the different activities prepared for them made them work on those goals.

Our planning was well made and we didn’t have many struggles with it,

everyone took responsibility for the time, the rotation of the groups, their own game and the atmosphere.

The first day appeared more difficult than the second day, as we didn’t know yet how the kids characters were and how they would behave, aswell as their teachers. Also the structure of our activities and routine was not clear then.

Eventhough we thought trough nearly everything, we had to learn and experience that it is not possible to think of everything and you have to be prepared for unexpected things to happen. The language barrier e.g. was a big challenge for us which we didn’t expect to encounter. We also improved ourselves learning about all the new activities and ways to teach kids, in our future work-life we will definitely take these experiences with us.

To me the Schools on The Move project was a  great working experience. Working with so many different people and cultures with diferents ways of thinking and also put in practice our new gained knowledge with Finnish children I enjoyed!

 

Here is the link of the video blog post.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-Cjco8cv-w&feature=youtu.be

 

Newsletter

 

We decided to write two poems about our experience on the Independent hike and our Autumn holidays. Enjoy!

 

Adventure in Teijo 

Imagine you are free.
Free in decisions, free in life.
Free in the nature – just to survive.
Feeling your body, your strength and your feet,
yes even feeling your indispensable heartbeat.

You don´t believe this state is possible to reach?!
Then close your eyes, breath in breath out and listen to this small speech.
Guide your thoughts far away from every trouble.
We tell you now one story of our erasmus bubble.

Everything started with the independent task,
where we should learn how to plan, to lead, to react in risk situations carefully and fast.
We split the group in teams of two,
one hiked to Teijo, one hiked to Nuuksio.

Imagine eight girls want eight different trails to hike,
Where should we stay? How many days? How many nights? – Well, that was difficult to decide.
With dialogues, with compromises, with compass, map and pother,
We found the best hiking plan by listening to each other.

With tent, stove, food, mattress and sleeping bag,
with hiking shoes, warm clothes, compass and map
we started our trip in finland’s beautiful landscape
to discover the world’s best nature shape.

Teijo welcomed us with coldness and snow,
nevertheless the joy about the independent trip was not to low.
We were happy to be free, be ourselves, be part of a team,
could hike in the woods, the nature was a dream.

But Wait! Stop! What is that?
The cable boat to the island we liked to set the camp was closed – how bad!
Now we had to decide what we should do fast,
the night came closer, we had to find a place to sleep before the sun passed.

We changed the plans and hiked to the place we planned for the last night,
what a zigzag trouble hike…
Without water in the camp and a cold, sleepless night in the tents
came silly after tired – so we had a lot of fun on the next day´s hike on the wooden planks.

We hiked through frozen grass and fairytale mist,
finally got water from the lake but that had a twist:
It was brown and had a funny taste, so we named it Jack in the woods
and treated it as it was on our cocktail list that brightened our moods.

On our ways we had some good conversation,
We laughed we cried and god some new inspiration.
We grew together
and when we found the second nights place to sleep
our connection was already pretty deep.

We defeated our food from mice and hung it up in the trees
our new home for the night was ready but we started to freeze.
The wood was empty but we met two nice finnish guys,
Minke even walked with them to get new wood for the campfire – what a pleasant surprise.

We talked a lot, i bet they think we´re crazy
because it got late, on sunday morning everyone was lazy.
Nevertheless we watched sunset and sunrise
took a lot beautiful pictures to memorialize.

On the last day we had a short walk but again trouble to find a place to set up the tent
we thought this struggles would never end.
We walked some additional trails just for fun and learning
then we had some time to enjoy our new surrounding.

Sauna in the evening, everybody was very motivated
we jumped in the lake, took some pictures even naked
the whole evening was very relaxing; we warmed up, filled the hot water bottles for the night
and even Mariona wasn´t cold, soon the end of the trip was in sight.

On the last morning we were very fast,
we hiked in warp speed and even catched the earlier bus.
We went to Helsinki and straight back to Kiljava
this Independent Hike all in all was very spectacular!

Do you know now what it means to feel free?
It means not only easy ways to see.
It means to have fun, be together with good friends
to make wise decisions, together, hands in hands.

Way to magical Norway

After long school weeks, all of us need rest.
Some went to Norway, some Iceland and some of us had guests.

We’re gonna tell you more about our holidays in Norway.
Important to say, after that all of us need payday.

We had a long trip, started with a ferry.
Sometimes we got lost, it was kind of scary.

No real food, just snacks for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
The positive thing is, all of us got thinner.

We spent three nights in Luster, at an Airbnb.
We loved the house so much, we didn’t want to leave.

We had a great time listening to Siem’s and Giacomo’s music.
They even dressed up, which was very amusing.

Did a lot of hiking, some even jumped in the freezing lakes.
While driving up the mountains we saw falling snowflakes.

Nature was so magical, it made the bonding easy.
Days were always full and in the evenings everyone was sleepy.

In the end the trip felt short, we wanted to stay longer.
We really feel that thanks to this, the group feeling is much stronger.

 

Blogpost by Mariona Ramis, Sarah Albrecht, Karolina Lõhmus and Johanna Westermayr

Introduction

For our friends, family or other persons how to want’s now what all the students of the Adventure Education Course Autumn 2019 doing is there a possibility to read sometimes a blog. In the blogs, you can read what we are doing, what our experience is and maybe pictures of that.

Blog 1

In this blog, you can read what we did the first days after arrival and the first days of school. But also what kind of activities we did or what we did in our free time.

First day’s in Finland

Everybody had a different reason to arrive on a certain day. We all arrived early so we could explore the area and slowly get to know everyone. The first day’s everyone chills a lot and there was a kind of vacation feeling. Because of that feeling and time was there enough space and time to know each other. The weather was very good, it was nice and warm so a jump in the lake, even lying on the beach or a nice BBQ as possible.

Most of the people visit Mustasaari, a little island in the middle of Sääksjärvi the lake behind the campus. The make a campfire and listen to music. There was a plan to sleep on the island but maybe we can do that in the op coming months.

Introduction days

The first day of school started and the best way to get to know each other is by playing some games. We started in the classroom and had an introduction by Sini and Juppe. They told something about themselves and there was a small introduction to the program. After that, we did 4 games outside (of course). It started with a cocktail party after that we had to make Europe and Canada with ropes. Each person has to stand on the place where they live and tell their name and with the study you do. After that, there was some speed dating, 30 sec for a lot of people to short so that was a good sign. When we are done with the games we reflected with the whole group and that was really nice!

The next day we did more games but than with the students form the 3-year program. In the games, we had to play with different people so you will get to know everybody! After that, we also did a reflection about the games and how it affects the group.

With this experience, we made in smaller groups also a program with games for the next day! That day we did the games with all first-year students of Humak. We had to play games and instruct games. it was a big success!

After that we had some small workshops about First aid, making a flower about our specialties and organizing something for the big opening! These 3 days we learn a lot about each other and how games can help you with that in the good order and instructions.

The first days of school

Already the first days of school were full of activities. We started on Thursday with our first kayaking lesson. To learn the basics, the first lesson took place in the indoor pool. In teams of three, we learned how to get out of the kayak, when it capsizes. We started by using only the kayak and gradually increased the difficulty level. In the breaks and after the lesson there was the possibility to warm up in the sauna next to the pool. On Friday we went to the lake the first time. First, we got a short but detailed introduction to the kayaks and how to prepare them for a trip. Then we took them from the containers to the lake. There, we could prepare ourselves for the kayaking. After a short introduction in a few basics, we went to the water. Unfortunately, we had to cancel the afternoon lesson because of a big thunderstorm. Instead, we started with an introduction to the topic orienteering. On Monday and Tuesday, we continued with the kayak and learned more about different techniques and also had our first trip around the big lake. The topic of Tuesday afternoon was the food planning for our first hiking trip to Lapland in the third week of school. We also separated the whole group into groups of three people. These are the groups which will stay together in one tent and will cook together every evening. The whole of Wednesday was about the trip to Lapland. We learned how to build up our tents and tarps by doing it by ourselves and what we have to consider. After that, we cooked in our groups our lunch with the Trangia. On Thursday we did our last plans for the Pallas hike and also the safety plan. After that, there was the grand opening of the HUMAK Campus here in Kiljava.

 

Free time

After the first days of school we’ve got to hear that there was enough free time left after school. The school ends around 4 pm and after that, you’ve got enough time to practice some skills, for example, kayaking and learn the techniques, orientation so you can read the map for the hike or if you don’t want to improve your skills you can go and explore Finland or another country.
We’ve done that the first weekend after the first week of school. We went to Tallinn the capital of Estonia and explored the city. With all of the 18 students that following this study, we were at Tallinn. It’s was a lovely trip to make and also a big challenge because we were with such a big group and everybody wants to see something else, but we figured it out. In and it was a nice first trip that we made.

 

 

 

Sara, Eline, Iris, Nele

The “Museum as Innovation Platforms” project deals with the question how the museums-institution can be used as a social discussion platform and how the museum environment and its contents can improve innovation processes and competences.

This process enriches the common museum purpose and creates a platform for discussion way beyond the usual museum content and creates a social space as well as a new learning environment.

The project, which started in 2017, is achieving this in three different steps in courses which were taking place in the Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova Museum in Turku as well as two workshops in the Museum of Technology in Helsinki.

As cultural management students from Germany we, Anna Büschges and Carl Postelmann, have the possibility to gain insights in this project during our internship.

We could attend at the European Creative Industries Summit (ECIS) in Helsinki.

Besides interesting speeches of creatives about the role of the European Creatives in shaping the European economic landscape we could get to know new cross industrial projects and actors in a poster session.

As a next step we will conduct a benchmarking with similar as well as continuative projects abroad and will have the opportunity to be part of two workshops in Turku and Helsinki.”

“In our studies in Germany we often deal with the question of the opportunity of museums as a social space which have to evolve from a traditional silent institution, so the achievements of the project are very useful for approaches in our work back in Germany.”

With workshops for innovating in the exhibition space itself the project finds new ways to function as a inspiration as well as source for problem-solving.

Text by Anna Büschges and Carl Postelmann.

The program starts to run to its end. But before everyone started to head back home, we had a final trip to lapland. This time out, we had to plan the majority of the trip by ourselves. This turned out to be a bit of a challenge, but we were excited to have one final trip all together.

Hiking

Monday and thuesday were hiking days! They were a bit different then our previous trip to Pallas national park. We didn’t needed tents for this trip, we had a nice little accommodation in Hannakuru. This made hiking so much lichter and therefore easier. Also doing the entire walk off road made the whole experience so much more special and intense.

On top of that you had the cold, the cold made sure that we really had an unique experience. Due to the cold the lakes were frozen and we could walk over them. It was even so cold that our drinking bottles froze while we were walking, but we didn’t really mind about that. It was nice to have a cold drink from time to time.

Overall it was an experience that we will refer to as magic from this point on.

Fat biking

After our hike it was time to go fat biking on Wednesday. After a short explanation of the bikes and gear, we divided us in 3 groups according to experience level. In the morning we started up with a tour around the town and some nice riding on the frozen lake. After that we picked up the pace and started to go off road and even doing a nice downhill part. After lunch some others joined our group and led by Kai we again found some nice tracks. We followed a single trail next to the lake and found a challenging hill to climb. It was a tough one, but the fun part is that when you go up you always have to go down again. Go pro mounted on my chest we rode down that hill. After that we took some nice trails and headed back to town.

On Thursday we had an independent day, and some of us chose to go fat biking again. We started of easy again, and took a similar route of the afternoon with Kai. We followed the single trail and back to the big hill. This time we filmed the downhill from 3 different points of view. After that we took more shots with Ruben’s drone on the lake and met up with others who were ice skating. After lunch more people got on the saddle again. Roel and Chris went to look for some more challenging sections and found this nice hill to climb. Although once we started we realised that there was no ending to this hill. Bucking through it we reached the top and turned around to descend. We found it so nice we decided to go do it again. But climbing again we cursed ourselves for it. After going down again we did it one more time before we started to go down on the other side of the mountain. The track we thought to take turned out to be a cross-country trail so there was no real path. Still we went for it and bumping over rocks and swamps we found our way back to town with a nice day burned in our memory forever.

 

Ice skating

On Thursday we had our independand day. A lot of people wanted to Ice skate on the Akaslompolo lake. We rented ice skates at a rental shop and for a lot of the students it was a suprise that we also got poles with them. The students from Belgium and the Nederlands were used to ice figure skate, but now we had ice skates attached to our boots.

We went all together on the lake and the first 15 minutes it was a challange to move on the ice. After a couple of trails and errors everyone managed to ice skate. Ice skating with poles was something that everyone needed to get use to it, but it was a verry fun experience

Final evening

Part Paulien

 

Ruben, Chris, Noor, Paulien

The last three weeks we had the schools on the move project. So, a lot of our time went to this project. For this project, we were divided in two groups. One group had to organise two activity days for twelve years old children from the school Maaniitu. The second group had to organise two activity days for the sixteenth years old ‘teenagers’, they were from another school, called Kuoppanummi. The goal of this project was to organise activity days, were we can exercise our leadership skills, how to make games, how to make a project plan and how to work in a group. Every group had to organise one day activities on their school and one day in Kiljava. In this blog message, we will tell you more about this project. We will first talk about the schools in the move project in Kuoppanummi. After that we will talk about the other school, Maaniitu.

Kuoppanummi

For the schools on the move project in Kuoppanummi, we were with eight in a group, namely, Sjeel, Lieke, Meike, Azzurra, Paulina, Chris, Ruben and Laura. Sjeel was the coordinator of the group. We divided our group in two work groups, the activity group and the organisation group. Which person in which group was depended on our strengths. So, everyone had to put their strengths on a paper and after this we made the two groups. Meike, Sjeel and Laura were members of the organisation group. They did mostly the project plan, script, timetables and safety plan. Lieke, Azzurra, Paulina, Chris and Ruben were members of the activity group. They thought about activities, made the lesson plans and made a background story for the day. We had a lot of meetings, some of them were in the whole group and others were in the smaller groups (activity and organisation) and some of them went really good and others took a little bit more time. After the first meetings and a lot of preparations, we had a good idea about how the first day would look like.

Our first activity day was the first of November. The idea was about the different cultures of everyone in our group. The children had to earn there ticket so that they could go to Kiljava next week. They could do this by earning puzzle pieces with every game. In the end of the day they had to make the puzzle, which formed a ticket. During the day, we divided the children in four groups. Each group had their own group leader. The group leader was the whole day with that group. Each group did four games before lunch and two games after lunch. Before lunch we had a ball game, a traditional Italian game, two is too less, three is too many and the trust game. After lunch, there was a special basketball game and the low ropes. Each game was standing for a different country. So, the instructor of each game, started every game with a short story about the country and the game. This was our first activity day. In my opinion, it went really well. Sometimes, there were some difficulties with the time management, some games were too short, but with some improvisation we found some extra games.

During the preparation, we did some things a little bit different for the second activity day. We had not so much time for the preparations, so we decided that we have no background story this time because it is not really important for children of this age. The school had already asked for activities like an escape room and box climbing. This made the planning a little bit easier. They also wanted to have a lunch outside with the campfires. During the preparations, we had to think about how we can do all this. We searched for two other activities. This time, we were really good prepared and also really motivated so there was a better vibe in the group. On the seventh of November, the second activity day, the children arrived in the morning in Kiljava. We divided them again in four groups and every group had again a group leader. We had five activities during the day, included lunch because not everyone had lunch at the same time. This was for the simple reason that the lunch was at the campfire and there is not so much place over there. The other activities were archery, an escape room, a guardian game and box climbing. The children were really enthusiastic during the day because we did some activities that a lot of them had never done before. We can say that the day went really well. There were some little problems but we could always find a solution for it. I think that I can speak for the whole group, when I say that we really liked this project, and especially the second activity day.

Maaniittu

As far as concerning the Maaniittu school, the target group was the 6^th grade kids (11,12 years old). We had activity in November the 6^th and the 13^th. We had 2 weeks of planning and meetings. Our group was made by 9 people, 2 democratic leaders and 3 smalls groups. The leaders were Roel and Isa, Caymen worked with the leaders, and the others groups were: Paulien and Sara, Noor worked with Marc and Nomedia with Sanne. We have chosen together  the main theme on the two days: Three Crazy Professors (Isa Roel and Caymen) built a time machine and they travelled in time; in fact the first day theme was the Past and the kids needed to help them to go to their present again because something went wrong during the time travelling and the second day they “Travel back to the Future”. Each executive group had their independent meetings with the task to decided their games and activities and try to fit them in the main story. Each small group had also the task to made a proper and detailed project plan and think about the risk analysis during their activity and how to prevent injuries. The leaders had the task to think about and lead the intro warm up games and the final game. The “Professor” group had also the supervisor task during the days. We were in touch with our teacher Sini only through our leaders, they had meetings with her and she gave feedback in that way. The leaders had also an e-mail conversation with the teachers of the school, and the responsibility to create a timetables for both days. We try to put it into practice what we learned about play and games during the first day in Maaniittu school and used adventure and outdoor activities during the second day here in Kiljarva Campus.

For the first day we had an introduction video that told the kids the story about the Crazy Professors and super funny warm up games; after that the 46 kids were divided in 3 groups, using another game in order to mix them. Each team had one hour of activity, and at the end of the activity the kids received a “triangle” and they had to put all of them together in the “Time Machine” at the end of the day. Sara and Paulien have chosen the Ancient Rome theme for the first day, they thought more about problem solving and cooperation game, both outdoor and indoor, Marc and Noor were the Vikings, active and fun games, and Nomedia and Sanne used trust and communications games. All groups thought a lot about decorations, costumes and make up, in order to let feel the kids more involved in the story. The first day was a success, teachers, us and the kids were satisfied and happy!!

The preparation for the second day included the same team, timetable and agenda used for the preparation of the first day but we had some difficulties. Some of us unfortunately got sick and some of us went away for the weekend and other felt a bit the time pressure. We felt a bit stressed and we didn’t practice much our games.. but at the end, at the 13^th, everything was ready: Sara’s and Paulien’s “Spaceship Escape Room”, Marc and Noor prepared active games about Aliens and Robots and Sanne and Nomedia a survial treasure hunt.We didn’t had time for a intro video but we went to the bus stop to welcome the kids with a march and we prepare some warm up and divided games.We tried to keep a good atmosphere even if there were some conflicts in the group. At the end of the day everybody was again relaxed and proud about our hard work, and we succeeded in our goals!!

On these two days of sport the teachers believed in us, in our abilities and they left us complete autonomy. They showed us in advance the rooms usable for the project, they gave us explanations on the number of students and they were always available in case of problems … There was a lot of collaboration. We were divided into two groups. We have collaborated within our group but we had moments in which we have been called to collaborate together (As for example in the day in Kiljava Opisto in which only one group of 8 people would not have been able without the indispensable help of the whole other group). We, students-instructors, even if we were divided into two teams, we worked and collaborated with the common purpose of concluding in the best way these 4 days of “school on the move”. In this project we had the opportunity to personally test the results of our work. After the first project, we did not waste time in starting the second which was very much better thanks to the previous experience. On the second day of activity the kids were happy to see each other again and excited to start the day. This was very satisfying for us! We worked hard and everything went well but we are aware we have much to improve, especially in the organizational question.
Our main goals: stay together, get involved, fun, movement and… improvement!

 

Written by: Sara Cignetti, Azzurra Einaudi and Laura Verstraete