After breakfast at the very trendy All Seasons Hotel in
Yogya we packed up our belongings and boarded the bus ready for our visit to
Olifant Kindergarten and Elementary school.
Although we knew that it was a fairly new school having
only opened in 2007, I certainly wasn't ready for the beautiful and modern
building that we discovered the school in.
Unfortunately right from the start we found out that Olifant has a very
strict no photography within the school buildings policy - not even in areas in
which there were no students - so there are no photos I'm afraid, however the
website of the school is found here www.olifantschool.com/ and there is a gallery of
photographs that you can access.
The early childhood part of the school caters for
children from 1 year old to 5 years old through a range of different services;
day care, play group and formal kindergarten.
The building was beautiful and well maintained. The facilities were also spectacular with
each early childhood room catering for a maximum of 20 students with 2 to 3
tutors - depending upon the age group.
Each room also had its own individual outdoor space with bi- fold doors
that opened the room up to the outside space - a very clever design. The early childhood area also included a play
room with small climbing and play equipment.
We discovered that parents were encouraged to come into this too with
their children for facilitated play time.
The lobby area also contained a waiting room for parents that had one
way glass looking out over the main play area for the younger children. Parents could sit and watch their child to
make sure they settled before heading off.
Parents can also log in via the Internet to various parts of the school
to see their child via CCTV. Children at
Olifant learn English from the time that they start and indeed we saw three
year old children counting in English to 5 already.
We then visited the Elementary school which has children
aged 6 to about 9 at the moment, with plans to continue to extend and grow as
each year passes. The building which
houses Olifant was built for it to grow and there are classrooms empty waiting
for the expansion. As each year passes
so they add a new year level. Currently
children up to year 2 attend, next year they will extend to year 3.
The elementary school has a core educational philosophy
which is built on the notion of 'unity through diversity'. There are three pillars on which the
curriculum is built - exploration, enrichment and entrepreneurship. The pedagogy at Olifant was researched and
developed by Professor Irwanto PhD.
We visited the wonderful facilities which were named
after the major continents - Australia music and culture centre, African Arts
centre and Chinese library just to name a few.
The school, unlike most Australian schools, was multi story, so some of
the playground equipment was actually inside of the building.
We visited some of the classrooms where we saw some
singing, writing and an English lesson happening. The classrooms in the Elementary school are
also capped at 20 students and most often we discovered at least two adults in
the classroom working with the students.
The board of Advisors to the school was very impressive,
with the very highly qualified people advising the school on it's program and
curriculum. There was some
acknowledgement that what the school is doing is very different to the norm,
which means that it can be hard to convince the community that what they are
doing is the right thing to do.
Overall Olifant was a very, very impressive place, with a
philosophy to education which was evident from the age of 1 in a child's l I've
through to the elementary classes - a well thought through and structured
contemporary curriculum.
No comments:
Post a Comment