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Some impressive mountain biking skills, time capsules, and Brazilian music fused with martial art: they’re all to be found on this week’s ‘School Spotlight’ page.
The Olympic Dreams School Search twinned UK schools with the old schools of Julien Absalon, an Olympic champion mountain-biker with the French Olympic team.
In this week's Spotlight, we see how the school team is getting on... including this unique tour of Julien’s hometown, Raon aux Bois.
We hope you'll enjoy the schools' videos as much as we did.
2011 is the UN Year of the Rainforest, and Schools World Service has published films for primary and secondary schools about the experiences of young people at school in the village of Mondana, deep in the rainforest in Ecuador’s Amazon basin.
We went there to visit Yachana High School which has been working in partnership with Sunbury Manor School since 2008 when World Class featured both in an online story.
The two schools were doing an enterprise project with support from Achievers International. Pupils at Yachana sent jewellery they made at the school to their UK partner. The UK pupils aimed to make a profit, which they send back to Yachana High.
Yachana High is known as "the jungle school".
Situated in Mondana on the banks of the Napo River – one of the Amazon’s greatest tributaries – Yachana High is a boarding school for young people from across Ecuador’s five Amazon provinces and is a Yachana Foundation project.
In the same small village, the state school, Juan Ortega School provides for children from nursery right through to senior school.
We were made welcome by everyone, and were able to speak to children and young people from Mondana village and across the Ecuadorian Amazon region.
Life in the Amazon is changing fast and many of the young people we spoke to welcome the changes.
In our Schools World Service Rainforest films we explored three themes.
Lizbeth tells us about the road which was built through her village last year. Henry takes us to visit his family. Oil has been found in a neighbour’s field and he’s worried about the potential for pollution. And Jefferson takes us home to see him and his dad cutting down a tree.
Everyone can see that it’s hard to balance development and the environment.
How long can these families and the rainforest co-exist?
What does a school in Essex, England and Mykolaiv, Ukraine have in common? More than you might think...
The schools were brought together through the Olympic Dreams School Search. Olga Kharlan, an Olympic gold medallist with the Ukranian fencing sabre team attended School Number 4. The school has now been twinned with Coopers' Company and Coborn School in Essex who can now boast a fencing talent of their own in 13 year old Fleur.
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Find out how the partnership is progressing other on their dedicated team page.
