FROM YEAR-PROJECT "LEAVING MARKS" TO INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL PARTNERSHIP
Dobra is a little village in Poland with 1000 inhabitants. Because it owns the only school within 7 km. 500 students come here daily.
The MONTESSORI SCHOOL Potsdam was searching for a polish school for their project "leaving marks" to establish a partnership. Building a playground together should be the first step towards that idea. Before building the playground in Poland, the polish class visited Potsdam.
The group writes about the project:
" We are the group "leaving marks" from Potsdam. In cooperation with KuKuk Kultur we built a playground at Dobra. Dobra is a small village in the middle of Poland with a school without any play possibilities.
In the meantime a huge playground including swing, seesaw have been built by us. The construction time were five days. We would have never been able to do this on our own, that's why we are rather happy to have had the support of four professionals from KuKuk and the polish students. After two days on the construction site a daily routine was developed. People knew how to to deal with tools and machines and everybody found his place. But it wasn't easy all the time: the wood is heavy and hard to work on. Many times the screws just broke... Another frustrating point was, that not all of us took care about empty batteries, which was leading to a lack of charged batteries for screwdrivers.
Nevertheless we were happy to see our progress in the evenings. Even on the first day, when we finished sketches and ideas within 30 minutes and dug holes afterwards, we felt the miracle happen...
Even if not everything turned out as planned, we always had to deal with challenges. That wasn't quite easy, but in the end, we learned a lot. Not only the basics of working with tools and machines but also to work at the construction site, no matter what the weather says."
To conclude the project together the group wished to plant two trees: a cherry and a plum. A symbol for the newly established friendships that have been planted with the playground project. Trees and the partnership are now supposed to grow, getting roots, bloom and to bear fruits.