Hollihaka Immersion School

We visited Hollihaka, it´s a school with about 360 pupils. They´ve got normal Finnish grades 1-6, English and Swedish immersion school, grades 1-6 and classes for foreigners. There are 25 teachers working in the scool, 6 of them teach in English. There are no other schools like Hollihaka in FinlandFirst, we visited the 3rd grade, the pupils were about 10 years old. They have 7 hours a week in finnsh and 17 hours a week in english. When they get older, they have more and more Finnish, in the 6th grade they´ll have as many lessons in Finnish as in English. They are really good at Eglish because they were in the English kindergarten when they were 3 or 4 years old. They speak only English with the teacher, but they speak Finnish together.We also visited the English 4th grade. They didn´t think English is difficult, but their teacher told us that the maths terminology sometimes is difficult. The group has 6 different teachers every week. After that we visited a class with foreigners, there were 7 or 8 pupils in the group. Only 3 of them spoke English. They were from Estonia, Irak, Sudan and Burma. Some of them had been in Finland only for some months but they knew some Finnish allready. They had a big library and many computers in the school. All the groups have their own classrooms, where they have most of their lessons. The classrooms were really colerful and there were lots of funny pictures on the walls. We thought it was interesting to see how well the young pupils spoke English. The pupils were really cute and nice. It´s nice that there´s an immersion school in Kokkola.