1st week at St.-Mary's

Hello everybody

So, my first week at St.-Mary's is nearly finished...
I gotta say, I really love that school! At first it took me some time to see what classes I could follow, what classes interest me and how many credits those classes are (so that I have enough credits).

I'm following three courses from the Erasmus program (Irish Cultural Landscape, Academic Writing in English and Reflective Journal) and 4 courses with the students of St.-Mary's (Literacy, Numeracy, Music and Art).
The Erasmus courses are very interesting to learn something about the Irish Culture and to improve my writing, but I'm really excited about my other courses. It's so nice to follow classes with the students at St.-Mary's and to see how they get lessons in numeracy, art etc.
It's interesting to see how they do stuff different and how some stuff is exactly the same as in Artevelde.
The thing I'm most jealous of is how well equipped there classrooms are. They have a numeracy and literacy center, a music room and an art class. The music and art class is similar to ours, with the difference that here it's all at the same campus, as for in Ghent we have to 'travel' to another campus across the city.

Today I got a chance to really observe the literacy center. Normally I had a literacy class at 9 am and a numeracy class at 10 am, but because of some reason (probably the upcoming school experience work ~stage) my classes were cancelled. So the first hour I spend in an empty classroom taking pictures and browsing through some of their work and resources.
They try to make the classroom look like a classroom in the primary school, with work from the students at the wall, lots of books to look in, some grammar and writing tips at the walls, .... Also the desks are placed in groups of 6, so not the classical positioned desks in a row like we have. This gives the class a very 'comfortable' feeling, and it makes it a lot easier to work in groups.
And because all the materials are always available in the class, it makes it easier for the students to do their work.
At Artevelde, we don't have classroom especially for literacy, numeracy, geography, .... So when we have a literacy class for example, the teachers always have to take the resources to the classrooms, which makes it harder for them and we get to see less.
I really think that's a huge loss at our campus.

At 10 am, when I normally had a numeracy class (which also got cancelled), I went to the literacy class of the other group (for some reason half of their class was in school).
But because only half of the group was there, the teacher couldn't give the lesson she prepared and we could go home.
So in a way, I got to school for nothing, 'cause I couldn't follow any of my classes, but it was so nice to look around in the classroom. And also, in the second literacy class there are two students who went on Eramsus last year to Artvelde in Ghent!! So it was really nice talking to them about their experiences. And of course they loved Ghent, who wouldn't :-p
So I'm looking forward seeing them again next week in class.

In a nutshell, my first week at St.-Mary's was very nice!

Aside from school, I'm ashamed to admit that I haven't done much yet, I haven't even seen the town center ...
But normally we're going into town this afternoon, so that should be good :-) Then I'll be able to tell you how the town is and perhaps I can show you some pictures...

So for now, that's all.

I'll post some pictures from the literacy class for those of you who are interested, or for my fellow OLO-students to show what we're missing out on :-/
(There are two classrooms in the literacy center, I took some pictures of both.)

Bye bye and take care :-)