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Colégio Tickles

Porto, Portugal · est. 2005 · Private

Illustration · Porto

Colégio Tickles opened in Porto on 8 September 2005 and is now in its twenty-first year. It is a private school on a single site on Rua São João de Brito, above Avenida da Boavista and next to the Parque da Cidade; the legal entity is Colégio Tickles, Lda, and the school operates under pedagogical parallelism, that is, on the national curriculum with the right to award its own grades. It takes children from 4 months to 10 years, and it is not a kindergarten with a school sign on it: alongside the nursery from 4 months to 2 years and the kindergarten from 3 to 5 years it has its own first cycle of basic education, Years 1 to 4, in a separate building with four classrooms and four basic education teachers. Teaching follows the Portuguese national curriculum with an English strand built onto it: Cambridge Early Years in kindergarten and Cambridge Primary in Years 1 to 4, which the school calls the first stages of the Cambridge Pathway. The Years 1 to 4 timetable holds Portuguese, English, Mathematics, Study of the Environment, inquiry-based project work, Global Perspectives, Visual Arts, Singapore Mathematics, Performing Arts, Robotics, a reading club, emotion management, Physical Education, Biology, financial literacy and digital literacy. The language of lessons is double. All the school's pages, its internal rules, its admissions procedure, its fee list and its educational project are written in Portuguese, and most lessons run in Portuguese; the school calls English a separate component of the curriculum, present all day, in daily routines and in guided activities, while in kindergarten the six areas of content carry English names and the children work, alongside their own educator, with a teacher whose mother tongue is English. The school explains this by saying that in the earliest years a child takes up another language most easily, and sets itself the aims of integrating children whose mother tongue is English and of building self-confidence in all children, national and foreign alike. The nursery has three rooms by age, the kindergarten two, and primary one class for each year. Nursery and kindergarten run 11 months a year, from 07:45 to 19:00, with teaching time from 09:00 to 17:00; primary runs from 07:45 to 19:00 with teaching time from 08:30 to 16:45. Food is cooked on site from fresh produce under regular external audit. Uniform is compulsory. The school runs its own transport and prices journeys case by case. Beyond lessons it sells speech therapy, emotional psychology and a study academy as separate services, and in the evenings runs ballet, dance, individual instruments, swimming, yoga, Aloha, Inventors, football, acrobatic gymnastics, capoeira and chess. The school publishes no pupil numbers of its own: its home page gives only cumulative counters across its years of work, among them 600 happy children, 134 outings and theatre plays and 158.400 meals served. The director, Cristina Taveira da Gama, writes that the school rests on a community in which pupils, families, teachers and staff walk together, and promises an environment that is safe and demanding at the same time.