Thies Family Adventure: School in Costa Rica

Chloe: I feel lucky that I don’t have to go to Davidson this year. I don’t have to wake up early every morning. I get to choose what time I do my schoolwork. I don’t have a dress code. I don’t have to sit through boring lectures by teachers, and I’m sure there is much more. But things aren’t all perfect. Sadly, there are also some disadvantages. The most important one is that I really miss all of my friends. I realized I needed to make some new ones. And where else am I going to find other kids? So I decided that I should start going to an actual school. About two weeks ago, I did just that.

Just Hangin' at school

Thumbs Up For Samara Pacific School

We visited a school called Samara Pacific and decided it looked good. They do half of the day in English and half in Spanish. This is helpful because it means the kids there DO speak some English. We only go for the Spanish half of the day because the classes are taught at a first/second grade level, and so we aren’t going to learn anything new when it is taught in English. Luckily, however, that means the Spanish is easy too. So far, I have learned about 200 new Spanish words. Sadly, I can only remember about fifty of them. Still, I am learning.

The entire population of the school.

Our teacher, Nicole

Aside from Spanish we do art, social studies, and science. There isn’t any math though, because that is taught in the morning. My favorite class is art. So far in art we painted a still life of a guava, a tomato, and some crackers. Then we made a picture frame by taking a square of cardboard and painting it. My frame was green with blue polka dots. In social studies class we are learning about el Hemisferio Norte y el Hemisferio Sur y los lines de parrallelos y los lines de los meridianos. All of these are on the globe, of course. In science we are learning about plants and animals and what they do. My first project was to draw a landscape of an ecosystem and label and describe the parts of the picture in Spanish.

My first art project

Here are some of things that are different about school in Costa Rica: there are only ten people in the school, we are all taught in one classroom even though we vary in age from six to twelve, our lunch time is unmonitored, we get to burn stuff with magnifying glasses, we can jump across old tractor tires, and lastly some of the kids there speak three languages.