Children and young adults are meant to experience life in a community with us. This applies to spending their time with people of the same age and with tutors, especially in the case of projects lasting several days. In principle, our free-time activities are set to be similar to life in a large family, which is based on respect and trust. Our tutors should aim at 'living on one level' with the children while maintaining their status of reliable adressees for any kind of the participants' problems. Anybody is supposed to feel that they are taken seriously on any of these 'levels'and that they get their necessary amount of attention whenever needed.
All items on a project's programme will be carried out by this group in a community. This may not only include workshops or other educational elements, but also the preparation of meals or finding ways of spending an evening together, for example. Appropriate times for rest and sleep and their observation or encouraging our participants to maintain dental or body care are also considered parts of communal life.
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Persistent communication of feed-back between tutors and participants, in both directions, represents a core aspect of our learning projects. We especially put a focus on motivation through praise or credit for individual achievements and progress, however, we also promote the ability to take criticism, in both directions.
Any child or young adult should be able to take part in our projects. We shall be unsparing in our efforts to remove any hindrance for individuals with special requirements, may they be pedagogical, psychological or medicinal. Both children and parents can trustfully adress us at any time, before or during projects, to talk about circumstances that may be problematic. When we are working together, this will lead to a successful participation in the project.
The organizational principle of our projects is to cater for the requirements of all children and young adults in a way that makes them feel comfortable in the community. This includes break times in which the participants are enabled to take physical exercise, but also individual offers for relaxation (such as the use of exercise equipment by children diagnosed with ADHD outside regular break times) and games promoting trust, confidence and community.
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Teaching and learning
### From children to children
Kinder erklären As we want to be on one level with our participants, our workshops are supposed to take place in a strong community. This is based on the tutors being children or young adults themselves, who are experts in a their field but shall aim at working towards a certain result in community with their peers of the same age. While doing this, both tutors and participants will be supported by our adult members.
Tools for individual learning
It is important that we not only occasionally support our participants' learning processy in our projects. This is why we make certain tools accessible to all children and young adults, using which they are able to work at home depending on their interests. For example, this includes the possibility to connect to the system used in our workshop from any home computer so that the participants can access their results and our software at any time.
In order to reach a certiain goal in a learning process, we agree on a desired result with our tutors and participants,the achievement of which is then approached independently with the necessary instructions and support provided by the tutors.
We put a strong focus on results that can be presented and that are looked back at by the participants with personal pride. This pride and satisfaction are our core criteria of good participants' and tutors' results.
