From February 17th to 22nd ISABELLA ANASTASI from Scuola Media Folgaria Lavarone Luserna, our Italian partner school, has stayed in Haiming, Austria.

After her arrival on the Sunday she started very early on Monday morning, at 07:40! Together with a group of 17 girls from the 8th grade she practised Yoga, showed them how to do butterfly and cat breathing, took them on an inner journey with a growing seed and let the girls massage each other. They didn't know what to expect in the beginning, but were enthusiastic at the end of the great lesson!

Two of the school's buddies, Theresa and Lorena, showed Isabella around the school building afterwards. The girls could practice their English while Isabelly enjoyed seeing all the classrooms and everything else in our school building.

Then we took up the great opportunity to let Isabella join two of our Italian classes as a native speaker in our 6th and 7th grade. The students appreciated having a "real" Italian in their classes.

As an educational Yoga teacher Isabelly could try out lots of exercises with our students who appreciated this very new experience.

On her second day in Haiming Isabella watched two different lessons of maths, the subject she teaches at her own school in Italy. With our 6th grade it was finding out more about triangles and with our 7th grade it was the new topic proportions. Although the two topics were not new for Isabella, she could watch our teachers teaching in a team with two teachers in the classroom at the same time. This works well for the students when the team of teachers are good partners who instantly react to the students' needs or give extra help or challenge for the fast ones.

We also compared and contrasted our different timetables and subjects in both our middle schools. In the picture you can see our 6th grade's timetable which shows the differences to the middle school in Folgaria/Lavarone.

Chemistry and Physics lessons were Isabella's next task. She participated in a lesson about acids and was quite overwhelmed by the professional equipment our chemistry lab offers. Also the lessons about electricity and radioactivity were very interesting and offerd new insights and teaching methods.

Joining two different cookery lessons gave Isabella the opportunity to watch our students learning about healthy food and trying different Tyrolean dumplings for lunch together with the kids.

After long and hard mornings with so many different lessons and topics Isabella took advantage of the marvellous winter weather and went on two skiing tours in Ochsengarten and on Feldring Alm. Although she got a bit lost on her first way she absolutely enjoyed the scenery and snow.

Our students' feedback on the time spent with Isabella was very positive as the following pictures clearly show. All of them are looking forward to hopefully meeting her again at the students' exchange in Austria next year in May.