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MenSI School Blog

The last F2F hub meeting of the Hungarian MenSI schools with an international guest

Chess Palace and Movement Scores

In the beautiful city of Kaposvár the teachers from the MenSI Green School Hub gathered for the last time in the project to share their knowledge, ideas, good practices and reflect on their mentoring activities, experiences in peer-to-peer learning and evaluate their collaboration as a MenSI team.

The programme started with a short school presentation and a tour by the principal, then continued with classroom visits. First we attended a Chess-Logic lesson where the teacher used the Chess Palace programme, an incredibly effective tool for developing pupils’ logical and creative thinking. Judit Polgár, the world famous Hungarian chess grandmaster created this unique, innovative and complex skill development method for young children which is used widely in Hungarian primary schools to help young children during the transition from nursery to primary school and during their lower school years.

 

Children waiting for the lesson to start       Life in the Chess Palace

After the lesson the teacher shared her experiences, challenges they faced using this programme and the participants discussed the possibilities of introducing Chess Palace into their own school practice.

In the next part of the programme we visited a special PE lesson using Mozgáskotta (Movement scores). It is a complex movement and personality development method for children of early age. After the children some teachers along with Ms. Cathy Gower on behalf of Brunel University, London entered for some rounds having much fun. It was such an inspiring experience that some guest school principals decided to implement it in their own PE lesson practice from the next school year already.

     

MenSI partners did their best in „Mozgáskotta”

The last main topic in the programme was the introduction of the OKÉ (Olvasó Kölykök Éjszakája) – The Night of the Reading Kids. It is an annual, 24 hrs school event held in and outside of the building, in various spaces during day and night with lots of tasks, projects, games, challenges for the 8-10 groups of pupils of 7th and 8th grades (aged 13-14yrs) coming from primary schools of Kaposvár. Pupils have to work in groups using mainly digital technology and complete various kinds of cross-curricular tasks all based on a certain book for example The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien which they have to read in advance. At this competition everybody wins and gets presents. It is a highly popular programme using usual spaces of school in an unusual way for learning and having fun!

              The Night of the Reading Kids – a really good practice

Inspirational thoughts formulated by the participats at the end of the meeting:

             Main thoughts: Inspiration – confirmation – innovation

’We wish to maintain the friendly and professional relationships developed during the MenSI project!’