Apart from the time spent on academic studying there are quite a few other things elementary school students do at school. General values held by Swedish parents are that there children should become good citizen of society, those behaviors should not only be taught at home but at school as well.

This in a practical sense means that if there is a fight during recess and the children come back into the class room with two groups of students looking daggers at each other, or one student has locked him/herself in the bathroom, the teacher might often decide to postpone the intended lesson, instead trying to solve whatever drama has taken place through either class discussion or individual talks while the other students get to draw or do silent reading. Teachers can often postpone lessons for other reasons as well, commonly when a good discussion topic becomes relevant, by taking that opportunity the subject will then have much more meaning to the students if they themselves choose to talk about it, or their interest was spurred by something very real to them at the moment.

A very strong view is that the virtue of being able to work in a group is truly valuable. Therefore group work is used almost half of the time students work on anything. Team building is another area a great amount of energy is put into. If one student is bullied, once a or twice a week a psychologist might come into the class for the purpose of improving class relationships.  Often girls and boys are separated into different groups to be able to address the issues at hand in the most appropriate way possible.

Other class activities might be class discos during the last lesson on a Friday, or the teacher showing a movie as a “fun” activity. (Some time with an educational intention). If the school’s location allows excursions into the woods then that is also something quite commonly done.

One can wonder if this approach to education is better than one purely focused on academic studying… For what purpose do we send our children to school? Those reasons are clearly different depending on what country and culture we come from.