English

Warm welcome to the internet site of the Rainbowschool in Bedum!

The Rainbow school is a primary school that exist for over 150 years. At this moment the school has two buildings. One is a monument that’s under government protection and the other building is a smaller building very near by for the youngest children of our school. We call this building ‘The Nursery-Dome”.

At this moment there are about 32 staff members in our school and 350 children. Since 2008 the school is merged with ‘The Association VCPO North Groningen” that’s responsible for 14 schools in this area.

The Rainbow school is a Christian school. That doesn’t mean we do Mathematics by counting disciples or something. We want do our name honour to: Diversity and differences between children, parents but also staff we don't want to sweep under the carpet. We emphasise them rather from the idea that every person is unique! And in our case a vision which has been clearly based on our Christian identity. It gives us the responsibility to adapt and connect to all those different children.

It also gives us the responsibility and inspiration to learn children to live with one another. We are glad and enthusiastic about working on this great challenge. For us this is a mission statement based on Christian philosophy

We are in the north of the Netherlands. A region that will decrease in amount of children in the future. In Bedum there will fortunately be less decrease than the rest of our 14 schools.

In our school we work from a schoolplan that was made in 2008.

The mission statements are:

• We want to work with energy, passion and pleasure! A choice we try to make everyday!
• Attention for head, heart and hands
• We want to give attention to possibilities from each other as teachers, but also and more to the possibility of children. It’s about what you can do and less about what you can’t.
• We give and receive responsibility. So we don’t have to discuss everything with everybody.

By telling something about the plan you hopefully get a picture of what we do and how we do it.

Education and care:

1. We work with this method called “Lifestyle”. Children learn to develop skills to life amongst one another. It also helps them to speak free about what they want and don’t want (setting borders).
2. We give children the opportunity to do a social resistance training in our school called “You can also do it like this!”. The training takes 10 lessons in schooltime. We offer this training 3 times in a schoolyear.
3. Working together and learning from and with each other we like to do in the BAS project. BAS means Building Adaptive Schools.
4. We are integrating technique in the curriculum.
5. We have attention for sports and healthy behaviour. This means we have a special classroom for sports, a sports teacher and work in projects to stimulate healthy food in our school.
6. We take care for children by having a good ‘care-system’ for the children. When children fall out, the teacher makes a plan with clear goals. There are two care-managers in the school. They are members of the management team in the school. These care-takers also take place in other networks around children.

Communication and structure:

1. We want to learn from each other by having intervision-meetings with the staff.
2. We work with special task groups to work out projects in the school.
3. We work together with other organisations. We work with an ROC (education to become assistant teacher) and educate these students in the Rainbow school. By doing this we help the ROC and also have ‘more hands’ in the classroom. We work together with Paddington, a afterschool childcare organisation that’s located in our building for 3 afternoons. We work together with a foundation for music in Bedum. They teach our children the ground base of music after school, but in the school!

ICT / Facility Management:

1. Our building is not build for the education we want to give. It’s a charming building but we hope to build a new school in the near future… WHAT!!?? Well, we can have some hope, can’t we?
2. We hope to use more ICT (computers, software and digital schoolsboards) in the future.  

Staff:

1. In our school there are 32 staffmembers. Most of them are teachers. Besides teachers there are Assistant Teachers (2), a secretary, cleaning staff (2), Care-Management (2), Team Leaders (2) and a lot of volunteers (parents) and students.

Want to know more? Study some Dutch and learn more on our website or send your email to: info(at)regenboogbedum.nl

Best regards,

Richard Aeilkema

Director Rainbowschool Bedum

©November 2009

 

 

With several countries in Europe we are trying to set up a life long learning project. We think it's important to give children the opportunity to learn from one another, but also let teachers connect with other teachers in other countries to learn in a whole new way. The project is called  'Storytime' and we are with five participants: 

Portugal - Ms. Christina Nunes and Mr. Vitor Silva

Poland - Mrs. Katarzyna Ratkowska

Spain - mr. Ignasi Planes Boladeres

United Kingdom - mr. Mark Wrigley

Greece (Cyprus) - mr. Constantinos Constantinou