Looking at the beginning of the school year and already thinking about the next steps, Extra Class, a program developed by Ternium at the Japão Municipal School in Santa Cruz, Rio de Janeiro, held the first edition of the Cultural Show on December 10. The exhibition featured spaces dedicated to arts, recreation, interactive science, and mathematics projects, and it even had a film session. All items of the event were produced by the students themselves since the beginning of the project in October last year. The Cultural Show was open to the families of the children and was also visited by regular school classes from Japão School.
Students and their families were together at the Cultural Show.
To perform the Cultural Show, the walls and tables of the rooms used in the Extra Class project exhibited the work that the students prepared over the last three months of STEM methodology classes, which stimulates creativity, intuition, and critical thinking among the children. According to Carolina Torres, Extra Class teacher, the event was designed to engage visitors with the pieces on display and will be held at the end of each school semester. “Our goal is for people to interact with the items and build their own experiences. This is our first edition, but there will be others next year,” she explained.
Angela Silva is a resident of the Conjunto Alvorada and the mother of the 7-year-old participant Ewerton Batista. According to her, the experience with Extra Class has been important to her child. “I found the event very nice, my son likes the project very much and he gets excited to come. Today I saw some of his works and the teachers praised a lot the fact that he has become quite outgoing and matured. The project has been good for his development,” she said.
Ewerton is in 2nd grade and brought his mother to visit the exhibition.
In addition, the exhibition presented a film entirely produced by the students, which was based on the children's book “Do not Spill the Milk!”. According to Angela, the community has received the initiative well: “To me, their film was very cool, I had never seen anything like that, which the students created themselves. Their other works are very colorful and different. We see in the children the happiness of participating. I have heard compliments from other Extra Class parents. That is why it is a solid 10, the future of the children is in good hands,” she said.
“Our goal is for people to interact with the items and build their own experiences”.
Claudio Motta, Ternium Community Relations Specialist, explains how the event was planned: “the Cultural Show allows students’ families, colleagues from Japão School, and even teachers to interact with the work developed during the school year at Extra Class, always with a very creative and dynamic approach to work the concepts in the classroom.”
Enrollment to join the program in 2022 will be open between January 31 and February 23. Students who attend the morning shift at Japão Municipal School and who are in the first three years of Elementary School will be eligible to participate.