https://www.outokummunkaupunki.fi/en/inenglish

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Kummun koulu (School of Kumpu) is located in municipality of Outokumpu in Eastern Finland, approximately 450 kilometers from the Finnish state capital Helsinki. All of the children among the some 7200 inhabitants of the municipality attend to the same comprehensive school that covers now the grades 0-9. This means that the whole of the age group of 6-16-year-olds is brought together in this institution of about 620 pupils that is operated by a staff of approximately 50 professionals. The school also cooperates with the local pre-schools, vocational institutions and the gymnasium. It is our wish to develop into a school of future, with guidelines to the teaching methodology and prime principles derived from the renewed and revised Finnish core curriculum for primary schools that came into effect in the fall semester of 2016. Key points of importance are equality between genders, cooperation between the school and home and engaging and making pupils part of the teaching.

 

Our school as a comprehensive school provides an opportunity to utilize the mathematics and science teachers in the teaching of our younger pupils. Usually this takes the form of collaborative teaching and makes introducing matters such as phenomenon based projects, basics of programming or mobile mathematics classes an easier task. These types of STEAM-CT projects give a great deal to the pupils but also further develop the expertise of teachers. The new Finnish core curriculum requires the schools to provide and facilitate programming, phenomenon-based learning, crosschool subject projects and cooperation between learners of different ages. We feel that these are great goals and that the STEAM-CT project provides us with great tools to incorporate these themes and methods in our teaching. Our school has great interest in using computers, tablets, educational software and virtual learning environments to aid our teaching.