EB1/PE Cruz de Carvalho

  • EB1/PE Cruz de Carvalho is primary school with preschool and kindergarten,with 217 students aged 4-11 and 32 teachers ,located in the heart of Funchal .Funchal is a city with more than 500 years of history. Nowadays Funchal has 110.000 inhabitants and became a city with an urban and sophisticated character. Its natural beauty and the easy access to the rest of the island are the main reasons why most of the hotels are found here.Some say that the city is named "Funchal" due to the abundance of a plant called “Funcho” (fennel) encountered by the early colonizers. The school was open in 1981 and at the moment it have almost 250 students splitted in classes from ages between 3-11. We have 11 classes (3 preschool and 2 for each grade). In preschool we have 73 students and in primary school 179. From these students, 30 have special needs (learning difficulties and/or disabilities). In the school there are 37 teachers (curriculum, arts, physical education, ICT, special needs, study and music ). Half of the students of the school are from low incoming A few ones were taken from the families (didn´t had conditions to keep them) and another small group of students are from emigrants families (most of them from East Europe) The educational system in Madeira Island is a little diferent from Portugal mainland. Most of public schools have classes divided. First and second year students (kids with 6-8 years old) have curriculum classes in the morning and third and fourth years (students from 8-10 years old) have curriculum classes in the afternoon. In the opposite schedule of the curriculum classes they have extra curriculum activities. Once a week we are developing a project in the extra-curricular schedule that let the students choose between 4/5 activities (can be something like exploring the city, do healthy food, make paper and etc… ) The students are not organized by classes instead they are divided byat they want to do. School is involved in different kind of regional and national projects, like road and internet safety, technologies, environment and literacy At the moment we are running 2 Erasmus+ projects called “Little Euro Guides” (2016-2018) and “Water Sources and Sanitation” (2027-2019). We have partners from Greece, Turkey, Italy, Poland and Wales. The person that will coordinate the project at the school is the headmaster . He worked in the last 12 years in school and in the ICT department of Regional Education Office that supports and defines the ICT curriculum for all the primary schools from Madeira Island. These ICT skills will promote a better integration of technologies in the project promoting the XXI century citizens skills. This teacher also personally participated in an AMERUR project, integrated in the program Interreg III-B, with partners from the Azores and Canaries Islands and developed Learning Objects to Chronos project .