Our school - a short description

Höjdens skola is a comprehensive school (primary and lower secondary level) in Tenala, Finland. Tenala is a small village about 15 km outside the town of Ekenäs (which Tenala is a part of).

Ekenäs

Our school is for Swedish speaking pupils. All the teaching in our school is in Swedish, but we read Finnish as a foreign language. Apart from Swedish and Finnish, we also read other languages. Everybody has English and some of the pupils also German or French. Of course we have other subjects than languages, like mathematics, chemistry, history, geography and so on, too.

Höjdens skola

The pupils in Höjdens skola are aged 7 to 16. There are about 250 pupils and 20 teachers in our school.

When pupils leave this school they usually continue to a higher secondary school or a vocational school.

In our school we have classes from 9 in the morning to 3 in the afternoon. That’s very hard during winter because the sun isn’t up when we go to school and when we go home the sun has already set. But we have a long summer vacation and at the end of June the sun stays up (almost) all night! The school in Finland is free and we get one free lunch in school during the day.

There are about 6% Swedish speaking people in Finland, almost all of them live along the coast. There live about 15.000 people in Ekenäs and over 80% of them speak Swedish. Ekenäs is in Finnish Tammisaari and Tenala is Tenhola. Ekenäs is a small town but there are good communications to the capital Helsinki (Helsingfors in Swedish), 90 km east of Ekenäs, so people sometimes go there when they want to buy for example clothes or go to theaters or visit the opera.

Höjdens skola, winter

The climate in Finland in the winter is very different from the summer. In January - February we usually have (sometimes a lot of) snow and it can get as cold as -30° in our region. In summer it can be +30° and people swim in the sea or in the lakes, which were frozen in the winter!