Activities during the year

At Eerde International Primary School, we pride ourselves on our sense of internationalism, diversity and ability to enjoy and understand these as a community

Every year, together with the secondary school, our team and students organise an international week, where we will celebrate our respective cultures in ways such as:

With more than 35 nationalities within our community, you can only imagine the diversity of this week.

Important is that we understand and respect each other’s cultures, taste local flavours and celebrate the diversity in our community.

We look forward to this week and want to encourage all at Eerde to participate, to communicate, to integrate and to be part of a wonderful week filled with events catered to our uniqueness.

We are extremely proud to be an official partner of the world-renowned Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The Rijksmuseum houses a rich collection of works by Dutch masters including Rembrandt, Vermeer and van Hals.

Eerde and the Rijksmuseum are creating learning opportunities to incorporate the Rijksmuseum heritage to enrich and extend into international educational programmes.

Our partnership enables the School to use art lessons and frequent museum visits to help our students connect with art in new and meaningful ways all while enjoying an enhanced learning process!

Workshops and exhibitions

Because we are an official partner, we get to see the most exciting and newest exhibitions at the museum.

To prepare our students for this, we plan a special customised workshop with a conservator from the Rijksmuseum at our campus in November and we will visit the Rijks with the whole school in spring.

Next to the exhibition there will be workshops held at the museum, tailor made for our primary students.

With a castle like ours, how can we not do something with that during Halloween!

Where our primary students are invited to dress up in Halloween style, our secondary IB students make it a competition to make our haunted castle during Halloween scarier each year!

For our primary students we will have fun activities like pumpkin carving, trick or treating, and eating scary food. But since last year they have also enjoyed the haunted castle of secondary, of course they enjoy the light version of the haunted castle.

One very special celebration in December that is celebrated at Eerde every year, is the Dutch traditional celebration of Sinterklaas, who visits our Primary students every December the 5th.

Kids are waiting enthusiastically for this celebration, involving a lot of preparations from them, too – they write letters and send letters with drawings to Sinterklaas already 3 weeks before he visits us. They learn various songs which they will sing for him when he arrives, both in English and Dutch language.

What is a Christmas without a Christmas Play?! Every year, our primary students work hard for months to practice the annual Christmas Play, which they will perform in our Goblin Hall in the Eerde Castle. A real play, with real actors (our primary students), costumes, decor, and an audience! After the Christmas play, all parents are invited to have a Christmas lunch together with the primary students and staff, to celebrate the beginning of the festive season.

The power of ‘together’ is not lacking at Eerde, and the bow cannot always be tense to get the best out of yourself. That is precisely why we go to the theatre every year with all pupils of Primary & Secondary, parents, teachers and staff. There we celebrate how much fun we get from music and dance because the children and teachers are on stage to show surprising things: sung songs, bands, dance, mini-plays, cabaret… Everything is allowed and possible! Everything is accessible, with fun as a priority.

During the Drama lessons, organised during the Friday after-school activities, children will learn the true beauty of drama and how to perform on stage.

After the Christmas play, the students will start preparing for the end-of-the-year play! Same venue, and same audience, but a completely different decor and story to tell! It is amazing to see the talents of our students, where they can play the role of their life!

To end the term and bid farewell to staff and students before the summer break, we will host our usual BBQ and whole-school activity.

It is a great opportunity for the whole school to engage in team building and fun activities together. In previous years we have brought activities to the school campus or taken students off to a local activity centre in the morning, returning to school for a BBQ in the afternoon.

During the BBQ we will also hand out the yearbooks, which is a great collection of precious moments of the academic year that has passed.

On top of all these pre-planned activities, the students will go on regular trips which suit their IPC themes, like a museum, zoo or playground.