Education

Our pedagogy is centred on the child and their interaction with the environment, for their full formation. Our philosophy is to allow children to build their own autonomy, to give them freedom and happiness in the way they learn and to respect their pace and needs, supporting and helping them pedagogically throughout the academic process. Our ethical principles are based on non-violence, community and our values, and are present in every aspect of our curriculum. We don't believe that individuals can grow and develop without life's problematising situations, such as competition, error, conflict and differences, which are also inherent to human life, and so we allow children in our community to naturally build their relationships in the face of these challenges, to help them learn to co-participate and co-construct with the world around them and to co-exist with others. We support our educational community - educators, students, families and other members - in developing skills that facilitate communication and conflict resolution, reflective practices and emotional learning.

Children 3 to 5 are welcome to join in our preschool, where there is lots of time for play, experiments, stories and essentially what ideas the children themselves have.

In a democratic-based system, we highly value the desires and interests of the children, so by exposing them to as much as possible, we start to see what sticks and what not. Our team of experts work with that on a daily basis, making every day different, but full of fun and moments of learning.

While normally children are directed to the school benches to sit, listen and learn – at Cerejeiras we do things very different.

Lessons are in Portuguese and our aim is to prepare children to be as ready for high school as the public system would, but by following a different route and at a pace that suits the child. This means there is lots of room for project based work, where children choose where and how they participate. And there is as much attention to arts, music and dance, as there is for math, science and languages. Examples of this are our regular yoga classes, performances in dance and theatre every trimester and our permaculture based garden and forest school walks that happen on a weekly basis.