ADDITIONAL PROGRAMMES

Students in all stages of education complement their school work with emotional education based on the Botín Foundation’s Emotional Education Programme:

The school has been part of the Botín Foundation’s Network of Responsible Education Centres since 2014. This programme aids students’ emotional, intellectual and social growth. It cultivates and promotes communication, conflict resolution, self-control and fosters self-esteem and confidence. It teaches respect, tolerance for a wide variety of opinions and educates students in universal values. The students also engage in exercises involving breathing, mindfulness, emotional intelligence, etc.

This subject is an integral part of the EPO stage. It aims at developing communication skills and improving body language, etc.

Motivation and positive reinforcement programmes in all stages:

We believe that behaviour improves more effectively when it is regulated by a coherent system of positive reinforcement, rather than one that focuses on punishment. At other schools, it is often the case that the amount of time and energy devoted to correcting bad behaviour greatly exceeds that which is spent on acknowledging the efforts of those students who are meeting the school’s expectations.

We believe that it is important to recognise our students’ academic, sports and personal achievements and positive attitudes. This recognition encourages them, creating a model of good behaviour that serves as a template and inspiration.

Teaching Playful Philosophy to children benefits the development of intelligence

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has already highlighted the importance of incorporating this subject into the educational system from childhood in its report “Philosophy, a school of freedom”, published in 2011.

The Fontenebro School incorporates since 2015 in its educational curriculum and exclusively in the area the Playful Philosophy Program, for children from 3 years to 6th EPO. The main purpose of this activity is to develop in children and their educators the ability to think critically, creatively and carefully (ethically and affectively). It is about learning to think better for oneself, in a playful way, about issues of existence: emotions, thoughts, family, society, time, money, identity, language, the world, friendship, etc. To do this, thinking skills, creative attitudes and ethical positions are exercised.

The Playful Philosophy Program is framed as one of the fundamental areas of the Noria Educational Project, created by Angélica Sátiro, Doctor CUM LAUDE in Pedagogy from the University of Barcelona.

The objective is that boys and girls learn to think and act considering different perspectives. It is even desirable that they do so from unusual points of view for them. And that the use of the ability to think and act creatively gives them pleasure.

Thanks to this program, Laude Fontenebro School students develop logical, creative and ethical thinking, and put into practice basic thinking skills that will make them think better, faster and more efficiently while learning to solve their problems. problems being more adept at facing the challenges of the 21st century. And all this in a playful environment of play and dialogue, where all opinions can be valid, using narrative and art as resources to think.

Julia García Morán, Coordinator of the children’s stage and responsible for the implementation of the project since 2015 at the School, tells us that “the methodology of working with children is participatory, creative, playful, interactive, dynamic and holistic. That is, it stimulates the overall development of children physical, mental, emotional, social”

Recent research suggests that teaching philosophy to children can produce a significant improvement in their level of intelligence. The study, carried out by Spanish researchers (Roberto Colom, Félix García Moriyón, Carmen Magro, Elena Morilla) and whose results have been published in Analytic Teaching and Philosophical Praxis, is a longitudinal investigation in which a follow-up has been carried out for 10 years, from the age of 6 to the end of secondary studies, of a group that received weekly philosophy classes (455 boys and girls) and a control group that did not receive these classes (321 boys and girls). . Both the control group and the treatment group had the same socioeconomic profile and both belonged to students from private schools in the Madrid area.

The results show that the members of the treatment group increased their IQ (general cognitive ability) by 7 points and 4 and 7 points in fluid and crystallized intelligence, respectively. In addition, philosophy classes with children reduced the accumulation over the years of the number of students in the “risk zone” .

Regarding the influence of these sessions on personality traits, philosophy students from an early age showed a tendency towards extraversion, honesty and emotionality. These traits could be enhanced, more than by the actual content of the classes, by the teaching modality that philosophy requires to be taught in classes: discussion groups, debate to question preconceived ideas and the continuous proposal of questions. Philosophy with children requires a much more democratic class structure in which the student is an active subject along with the rest of the classmates and the teacher becomes a facilitator and guide for the student’s research (something that connects very well with with Vygotsky’s theory of the zone of proximal development).

The particularity of philosophy is not so much the content of these studies, understood as a “package of information” that is transmitted unilaterally from the teacher to the students, but rather the role of this discipline as a favorable framework for asking questions and proposing answers, that is, Create your own way of seeing the world.

One of the great challenges in the education of future generations is to promote ecological thinking, which is why the centers associated with this Program also have a project to create a garden based on the stories in which the stories to think are developed ” Juanita and her friends. To this end, Laude Fontenebro School already has its own Playful Philosophy Garden, conceived as a space to play, think, interact and where children develop that ecological awareness from the experience of cultivating and caring for the garden.

Playful Philosophy for children is currently taught worldwide in countries such as Portugal, Italy, France, Norway, Canada, Australia, Uruguay, Mexico and Brazil, etc…

Belonging to the International Schools Partnership chain, Fontenebro School offers a bilingual, comprehensive and personalized educational project for each and every one of our students, according to the qualities, aptitudes and values ​​that they will need in the future.