DES (Interactive European School in Greek) is a private school located in a very nice located suburb of Athens, near the sea, named Varkiza.
The bilingual kindergarten is located in the center of the town of Varkiza and host 60 students and 12 teachers. The elementary school is located in a nearby hill, in an area of 20 acres and host 120 students and 25 teachers.
Dr. Billie Konstantara – Riga, DES founder, has for fourteen years propose a differential educational approach based on the theory of “Multiple Intelligences”, developed by Howard Gardner. This perspective has been widely adopted and our kids are happy, creative and curiosity driven to explore and learn.
In DES, lessons are being taught in Greek and either in English or German. Our kindergarten has been accredited by the German Embassy in Athens as one of the ideal schools for German speaking children.
The elementary school is a sustainable school, with many environmental projects. In our school premises we have stables with donkeys, chicken farm and bunnies. DES educational approach is unique since in the basic program a student, from the first grade, attend in a differentiated model: sailing, yoga, literature and arts, music, coding and STEM.
DES school educational approach is based on gamification in a variety of ways and implementations. Our unique natural environment flourish our teaching activities, which is helping us to run them with the use of our farm animals and our green house. This kinaesthetic way of blending real life scenarios with bits of knowledge engage the curiosity of our students, driving their motivation.
DES program has a bilingual perspective and our students speak and read fluent English since we are an IB PYP school. This will be very useful to collaborate, exchange ideas and communicate with students of partner schools. Also in DES school students are attending as a second language either French, German or Spanish under the CLIL approach (Content Language Integrated Learning).
DES school is giving opportunities to every kid, to learn in her/his own pace, to follow a personalized rhythm. Implementing the Socratic didactic method, inquiry based learning acquisitions are part of everyday curriculum. Reading is playing a crucial role to applying our differentiated learning approach. Books provide the scenario of many project based activities that can be incorporated in multiple ways in students’ learning paths.
Math subject is something in which we put a lot of effort and energy. We are implementing game based approaches and use of real life case scenarios to make the lesson beloved from the students.
The teaching approach is twofold. We are under the Greek curriculum which is based on a constructivism approach, but we use for our English classes differentiated learning procedures based on the theory of multiple intelligences. Our teachers are bringing methods and ideas from worldwide educational systems in order to achieve problem solving approaches for our students. I can say, that we flourish our didactic implementations with the Socratic method and let knowledge extracted from real case scenarios, previous knowledge and observations rather than formal teaching methods.