International Nordic Adventure & Cooperation

Hello our friends in Scandinavia!
We are 8th and 9th grade students from Suomussalmi Finland. We have seven pupils in our class, six boys and a girl. Why our class is so little? We are students from normal comprehensive school in Finland, but we study things a little bit different way. We have more practical lessons, school camps and working periods. This is some kind of “learning by doing” way to study.
Our class is called JOPO-class. JOPO comes from Joustava Perusopetus, which means flexible basic education. We have four working periods in a year and they are two weeks long each. On those periods we get to know things about real work. We also get to know how to seek and get a job. We also want to find out what we want to do in the future. We have four school camps in a year. On those camps we really go camping. We sleep sometimes in tents, even in winter. We cook our food by ourselves. We need to take care of ourselves and our friends as well as our clothes and other things. In every camp we have lots of activities. We go hiking, ice climbing, canoeing, etc. We learn social skills and surviving. We also learn many skills that we need in life.
In school we have normal school days. We try to study hard to get good grades. Working periods and school camps affect to our grades as well as how we do in school. In school our teacher Ville teaches us, but we also have a youth worker Mikko, who keeps our JOPO-lessons. On those JOPO-lessons we learn about work, health, society and many other things. JOPO-lessons are practical and we often go out of the classroom.
We would like to learn about other cultures and how they live or go to school in their country. We need more practice in foreign languages and youth exchange would be the best way to do that. We could offer you a school camp done in our way in April. We would love to have a camp in your country. Common thing on both camps would be an adventure education. How we could learn important skills by operating in the nature?
Best Regards,
JOPO-class of Suomussalmi
Ville, Jere, Joonas H., Joonas S., Hilla, Kalle and Konsta