Primary School Horvati (Osnovna ?kola Horvati)
Primary School Horvati (Osnovna ?kola Horvati) was founded in 1897 and has had long tradition, being one of the oldest schools in Zagreb). This public school has over three hundred students, age 6-15, classified into 4 upper and 4 lower grades (292 students).
We take pride in providing safe (UNICEF programme ? school without violence) and challenging environment for our students. Besides regular classes, students can choose different elective subjects and extracurricular activities.
Primary School Horvati was awarded by The City of Zagreb for contribution to the development of educational process.
Also, the school is well known and takes great pride for its successful inclusion of students with special needs (especially cerebral palsy), who participate in all the lessons according to the adjusted curriculum (medical staff is also involved).
Our students actively take part in various projects and interest groups such as EU projects participation and videoconferences.
The school gives special support to these kinds of projects that involve improvement of teaching methods, IT and knowledge of foreign languages.
Zagreb, the capital, is the biggest town in Croatia. The City of Zagreb is a cultural, scientific, economic, political and administrative centre of the Republic of Croatia. Our school is situated a few kilometres from the town center. We teach students with different social backgrounds (successful inclusion of children with special needs – for example cerebral palsy, minority?s, students that need individual approach), the majority of our students come from average Croatian families and don?t have adjusted curriculums.
Number of kids with special needs: 21
Number of kids with adjusted curriculum: 6
Number of kids with individualized programme: 15
We have experience in usage of WEB 2.0 tools and we were involved in creating and testing new teaching methodology AMORES project (EU funded- Comenius Multilateral Project) for motivating children to read. We try to encourage collaborative learning and problem solving lessons. All of our teachers are qualified (college degree) and some of our teachers have been promoted (mentors, counselor, PhD graduates, the Code Ambassador, Go-Lab teacher, expert in using and creating digital materials for students and teaches). They attend training courses on a regular basis. We are proud that large number of them have been involved in different projects (EU, e-twinning, national one, etc.).
The school has deepened its experience in management, training and use of ICT in educational contexts, self-assessment and the horizontal and vertical curriculum articulation, as well as the integral development of the student, in particular of multiple intelligences and skills for the 20st century.
We have experience in creating stories and some experience in story-telling. We have experience with e-twinning projects and creating and running a blog in English.
The children are confident to use technical language and concepts such as organizing, sorting, predicting, debugging, decomposition and abstraction. Children understand networks, the web and the internet.
Primary school Horvati has employees who, although working in inadequate conditions, are always willing to learn and change their approach to teaching. Since the school has been well known for creating inclusive environment for students with special needs, we believe that the school staff needs lifelong training. By self-assessment we have identified areas where, as the school, we should achieve even greater improvements. The improvement of basic and transversal competences and skills, as well as the quality of teaching (regarding especially the basic skills of the weaker students of our school), is necessary for the successful educational process. We also think that we need to encourage higher quality and excellence in innovation and internationalization of the school in terms of education and training (particularly the use of new teaching methods, ICT in the digital classroom, the STEM field). One of our goals is certainly to improve the international dimension of education and training in our school.
Croatia, as a country, at this moment, is in the middle of the new school reform project. We are trying to change direction on a national level: new ways of teaching, creativity in teaching, new ways of work evaluation, revision of subject curriculums – trying to lose unnecessary themes, development of critical thinking, logical way of thinking and coming to conclusions, teacher authonomy in choosing the teaching methods, getting students more active etc.
http://www.os-horvati-zg.skole.hr/