Every school break our wonderful Hort educators, who care for our students throughout the term, prepare a full, whole day program for all the children who attend Holiday Hort. Keep in mind they spend the entire day with a lively group of children across the whole primary school age-spectrum. Teachers get a period off here and there as well as lunch breaks free during the regular school day. Our Holiday Hort educators do not. They are there 7:00 to 17:00 constantly offering fun, guidance and care. They eat meals with the group, they go on excursions, they build fires, officiate races, bake and cook, craft and paint, explain and discuss all day long and they always look like they are having as much fun as the kids are.
This Holiday Hort was a trip around the world. Monday started in wintry Greenland in our own green landscape – the school garden. Learning about building material in one of the harshest environments on earth, students partook in group experiments with melting ice. After dividing up into groups they competed in building igloos out of sheets and pegs and lastly held a “snow dog” race on the play ground, taking turns being the driver and the hounds. As a special treat everyone made stick bread around a big camp fire.
Tuesday saw everyone traveling to Jamaica with a Dance-Hall workshop in the Gym and a lot of fancy hair styles for everyone with hair long enough to plait.
A trip to the ice-rink on the Augustus Platz had been planned as the mid-week highlight but the rainy weather meant a trip to the Cinema instead. Pop corn and a film with all your friends on a rainy winters day is consolation enough for not being able to spin on the ice or ride the Ferris wheel.
Another trip to warmer climes was taken on Thursday as the group visited Vietnam; making fortune tellers and lotus blossoms out of paper, using things typical of Vietnam to explore our five senses as well playing the Vietnamese game of đá cầu – the national sport – using a feathered shuttlecock.
On Friday, the last day of the winter break, the group had a visitor from Chile who taught everyone how to make Chilean empanadas. The morning was spent rolling dough and choosing fillings and baking these delicious snacks in the Hort kitchen. In the afternoon our visiting cooks held an acrobatics workshop in the gym with everyone making human pyramids and words.
C H I L E
Enormous thanks to our Hort Team for all their energy and care and planning. It really paid off!