agatha snellen school

Utrecht is the fourth largest city in the Netherlands and like Amsterdam, it is divided by a series of canals.  The canals, winding medieval streets, and trees bursting with yellow, orange, and red leaves made the city very picturesque during my brief fall visit there.

Agatha Snellen school is situated in the city center across from a park bordering a canal.  At the end of the school day children spill out into the park and into the city streets, many riding their bicycles home.

I was buzzed into the school by a student.  Children circulated purposefully throughout hallways.  No one was in the front office. I stood around until I caught sight of an adult face.  Anja was very kind- she seemed tickled by my presence there and arranged for me to observe in a kindergarten classroom.

I arrived in Martina’s kindergarten class at the start of the school day.  The room was spacious and colorful.  It looked like a playhouse.  There were multiple child-sized spaces filled with things to touch and play with.  Taped up children’s art shone through large windows bordered with swinging garlands.   Colorful banners hung across the ceiling to celebrate a student’s birthday.

To start the day, the children brought their chairs into a circle and played a trust game.  Martina chose two children to come into the center of the circle.  One wore a blindfold and fell back into the arms of the second.  The children seemed to love this activity and enthusiastically volunteered to be blind-folded.  After a few rounds, Martina called two pairs of kids into the circle at a time.

After the trust game the children chose what they wanted to do.  Each child had his or her own magnet to place under a photograph signifying an activity.  There was a flurry of activity as the children worked together to arrange furniture, bring chairs to various parts of the classroom, and set up learning activities.

Martina explained some of the aspects of her classroom while the children organized and settled in.  She showed me a table at the front of the room covered in pictures and objects.  Rain boots, umbrellas, illustrations of trees changing leaves- these items were selected to evoke the current theme of the curriculum.  The table changed when the theme changed.

Art seemed to be an important way to interact with these concepts. A painting station was set up in the back of the classroom.  Martina showed me student art related to the number eight and explained that students practiced this shape with both their dominant and non-dominant hands to develop fine motor skills. The “eight” drawings were decorated with individualistic decorations that seemed to reflect the creative whims of the student.

The students seemed engaged, interacting freely and happily.  A boy and a girl stacked large legos to form a barricade in a corner of the classroom.  A group of girls sat around a table: each had drawn a rainbow on a piece of computer paper.  Children sat next to the playhouse arranging nature-related vocabulary words laminated as strips onto a game board.  They used motorized ladybugs to advance their positions on the board.  Three students tapped iPads near the teacher’s desk as they navigated a math game.

The birthday party began at the end of the class.  The kids brought their chairs back to the table in the center of the classroom.  Martina brought out a “cake”- which was really a piece of plastic made to look like one.  She lit candles and crowned the birthday girl with a paper crown. Everyone sang the Dutch Happy Birthday song loudly.  Afterwards, the English version.  The birthday girl blew her candles out.  A volunteer passed out packets of crackers to each person around the circle from a big basket.  I happily snacked and smiled alongside a group of happy Dutch kindergarteners before finding myself back in the city.