Osnovna šola Toneta Okrogarja

Tone Okrogar Primary School was built in 1903 and we are very proud of our history, present and future. We are not a small school, as each year we have around 500 students from ages six to fifteen (from the first to the ninth grade). Our school is located in the suburbs of Zagorje ob Savi, a town in Zasavje region that lies 50 km east of the capital city of Slovenia, Ljubljana. To get from our school to the centre of the town it only takes a ten-minute walk. The town is surrounded with beautiful green hills and offers all the necessary infrastructure. Tone Okrogar Primary School also has two branch schools. One is situated in Kisovec, a small town located 3 kilometres east of Zagorje, accessible by car and by bike; and one in Šentlambert, a really small village that is 5 kilometres away from Zagorje, accessible by car or by bus. The specific, and also an additional value, of our school is the variety of our students’ nationalities. Children who attend our school are also immigrants from Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina and other countries, mostly ex-Yugoslavian republics. Due to this fact, we have learnt to live and work together in harmony and tolerance, teaching our students the importance of accepting different cultures. Our school was the first primary school in the region and it was built for the children of the miners that moved to the city of Zagorje at the turn of the 20th century. The coalmine has now been closed for over twenty years. The school has a playground, a gym, an outdoor classroom, a school vegetable garden, a rock garden and a bee house. Our students can therefore enjoy an additional learning process through different after-school activities. Despite the fact that many students attending our school come from low socio-economic environment, we want to offer every single one of them quality education, broaden their horizons and give them a chance to develop intercommunication skills. Our students can learn English as their first and German as their second foreign language. They can start learning English from the 1st grade, by CLIL principle, and German as an optional subject from the 4th grade. We provide them with many different free time activities, cultural education and entertainment. We organise different school projects, such as the English weekend, Maths weekend, travelling to foreign countries and many more. We are proud to say that we have been an Eco-school partner for over 15 years and also hold the title of a Cultural school. Eco-school is a European and all Slovenian project that has been established for the purpose of ecological education of children. At our school, we try to use the new approaches in school education and therefore provide our students with the possibility of experiencing a different learning process. We have been introducing new teaching methods in our classes and our teachers regularly participate in seminars and workshops. All of our teachers have accomplished some of the basic e-competences in an all school project with the Ministry of Education. Distant learning was a process that was challenging for all the teachers, but at the same time enabled them with new knowledge regarding new technology and its use in classrooms. Both the main school and the two branches are closely linked to the local community by being actively involved in various projects and actively participating in organizing and co-creating various events within many different organizations of the Zagorje ob Savi municipality. We regularly cooperate with our local Youth Centre in different after school activities and workshops for children; and throughout the whole school year we work with the EVS/ESC volunteers who mostly assist at English lessons. We want to include volunteers in other school subjects as well. We find this cooperation very useful in a sense of introducing the students to different cultures, languages and nationalities. We like to say the following: “If the students do not have the possibili