by Christina Beitzel

21^st – 25^th October 2024

Sarah and Christina have been in beautiful historic Florence this week with the Acaδimia European Teacher Academy for Creative and Inclusive Learning. This is a wonderful EU-sponsored project which aims to share creative teaching methods from all over Europe (and one day the world!) to help teachers from many educational streams incorporate creative methods in their classrooms with a view to increasing inclusion and co-operation in European schools.

This week, we worked with teachers from Greece, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, Iceland, and Hungary, who travelled to Florence to participate in training so they can bring their skills to their home countries with the ultimate goal of reaching 10,000 or more children through a wide community of support and practice. The Acadimia project comes from an amalgamation of ten previously completed EU education projects, including the SEDIN and MonTech projects which Waterpark Montessori collaborated on in the last few years.

Our first session was with MonTech, a cutting-edge method developed in partnership with the University of Girona, which uses Montessori principles to promote active and creative use of technologies in the modern classroom. MonTech not only uses creative digital tools like Scratch and Makey-makey, but also hands-on, screen-free activities to help children (and adults!) learn with their bodies. Concrete to abstract is the Montessori way! Keep an eye out for Sarah’s exciting new book, Montessori in the Digital Age, coming in the next few months!  

Next, we trained trainers in the SEDIN method – a creative approach based on some Montessori principles that can be used by teachers that do not have Montessori training. The central goal of the SEDIN project was to promote the inspiration, drama, movement, and culture of respect that we see every day in our Montessori classrooms to help teachers to support the integration of migrant and refugee children as they join our European community. We had so much fun with grammar, math, science, and of course exploring the cosmos with our new teaching colleagues.

The Acadimia project will continue and we’ll be travelling to our other partner countries in the coming two years. While in our ideal world, we at Waterpark would like every teacher to be a Montessori teacher, we believe that sharing our method however we can to reach as many children as we can is work of great value. Thank you to all of our partners and all of the wonderful teachers for their hard work and creativity this week.