Finland+Group+2

Dear Canadian friends,

We are two 15-years-old girls from Finland, near by Finland’s capital Helsinki. Our school is Mankkaa School in Espoo. We are on the 9th grade and we will turn 16 during this year. Our names are Taija and Elisa and we are good friends and we have known each others from first grade. Taija plays soccer all the time and coaches little 10-years-old soccer players. Elisa rides a horse and takes care of her little guinea pigs. Taija likes also ice hockey and she wants to become a ice hockey director when she grows up. Elisa likes also dogs and works as a dogsitter.

Some questions for you: - How long are your school days? - How long way do you have to school? - Do you live near your friends? - What do you usually do after school-day and at the weekends? __ Finnish school system __ We start school during the year when we turn 7 years. The school starts in August and we have two terms in the year. Between them we have a Christmas vacation, which lasts 2 weeks. Between two school years we have a 2,5 months summer vacation. Primary school lasts 6 years and on the 3rd grade you have to start studying English or some other foreign language, usually German or French. In primary school there are usually 20-30 pupils in the class, differs from region to region. In small towns for example in northern Finland, the classes are smaller than here in the capital area. In the 5th year we start studying history. Junior high school starts at the age of 13. There we start some new subjects, like Swedish, Food & Nutrition, Health Education and Pupil Counselling. The 8th grade is the last year when we study history, at 9th grade we start Social Studies. Junior high school ends at the age of 16, so we have the last spring going on. So, junior high school lasts 3 years. After that, we have to choose do we go to high school or vocational school. The both takes usually 3 years, after that you can go to the college or polytechnic. this is our school :)

Our compulsary school subjects are English, Swedish, Finnish, Maths, Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Geoghraphy, History and Social Studies, Pupil Counselling, Health Education and P.E. We have altogether 30 lessons in a week and school days start usually at 8.10 am. and end at 13.50 pm. We have two hours of P.E. in a week and also some elective and optional subjects. In our P.E. lessons we play ball games like football, floorball, basketball, volleyball, badminton and tennis. We also dance boys and girls together in pairs and sometimes girls alone for example latin dances. We have practised in gym. We skate, play ice hockey and ringette. We have swum, ridden a bike and had athletics. And girls will have an aerobic lesson too. We also like to play "pesäpallo" which is little bit like baseball. You can read more about pesäpallo in other groups texts. In optional P.E we have visited in down hill skiing centre for a day and climbed up a wall. We have a lot of extreme sports in optional P.E. Taija has optional P.E and likes that a lot. this is a "pesäpallo" ground and players

this is our Chemistry book this was our English book last year

__Our class trip in Kuusamo__ We visited Kuusamo, which is a little city in the northern Finland, for a week last fall in September. We lived in host families. There were girls and boys as the same age as we. The students were very nice there and we made a lot of new friends. We did many kind of sports for example badminton, hiked in the forest (we had an adventure where we spent almost whole night outside in the nature running and having fun). We also rafted, tobogganed without snow, saw some reindeer and climbed to the ski jumping tower, visited a national animal park and saw for example bears, foxes and lynxes. We enjoyed the trip very much, weather was also great.

We live in the southern Finland near Helsinki, which you can find in the map and Kuusamo is the yellow-coloured area in the map. We travelled there by train and bus and the travelling took the whole day.

We would have liked to travel abroad for a class trip, but we did not have enough money and we did not found any nice friend school which we could have stayed in.

Word list English-Finnish Christmas = joulu ice hockey = jääkiekko soccer = jalkapallo English = englanti Chemistry = kemia a forest = metsä a map = kartta a reindeer = poro a school = koulu thank you = kiitos a friend = ystävä money = raha