THE CRA Our story, as most of them, are made up of lots of variables which helped, conditioned, stopped, and launched us according to the circumstances. But what made our story different was the fact of dressing it with imagination, collaboration, devotion, friendship... We are a group of teachers which enjoy our job, and try our children learn to learn having fun and using all the tools they have. We have nothing special, nor the best conditions to implement our work, but we found out there?s no borders, only those which exist in our minds. To make it clear; if you want to understand our point of view, just try to make people enjoy and enjoy yourself doing things. WHAT IS A C.R.A.? C.R.A. is a school, of course, a special school. C- Colexio. School. R- Rural. Rural. A- Agrupado. Grouped. One C.R.A is a institution made up of several Unitary Schools, in which children of different levels and ages attend school. Nursery school and the first cycles of Primary are included. Unitary schools have a very special idiosyncrasy, which conditionates the kind of education children receive. They are not grouped according to their age, as it happens in any other school. Children of different ages attend the same classroom and interact , which helps in the development of their personalities. The evolutive moment, is done by the affinities among the students and not by the age of the students. And more important, in our classroom, we are all teachers and students at the same time, because we all have something to teach and something to learn. Finally, the Unitary schools, which made up the C.R.A are totally integrated into the children?s environment, they are the frame where children are raised and they don?t feel uprooted. WHAT IS OUR C.R.A ? Our C.R.A, apart from what has been said in the previous lines, has got something very special, that probably most of this kind of Institutions, we even say the majority, share, but outspread in very few occasions. We are a group of people that have found the way to develop our job with real devotion, imagination... Our C.R.A. was the legal support which allowed our philosophy to be developed in better conditions. Before creating the C.R.A. we used to work as a group, though the limitations of our situation: little money from the Government, the lack of material aids, problems in finding a meeting place, the lack of specialist teachers in other subjects, made our job quite hard. But we overcame all the problems and we got to make our planning together, and work with the same activities at the same time. Our school or institution is made up of 5 unitary schools, placed in different villages in the Council from Ponteceso, the distance between them is about 8 kilometres and we have got a head office, our meeting and working place. Located in the second floor of one of the schools. Two more unitary school work with us: ?Divino Salvador? from Pazos and the one from Fontenla, placed in the council of Cabana. Both teachers were already integrated into the working group before the C.R.A. were created. We are seven teachers and work all the subjects in Primary and Nursery school. English, Physical Education and Music, are given by specialist teachers. One of them gives music and is the tutor of one Unitary at a time. Our students are aged between 3 and 10 years old. Their distribution is not the same in all the schools, and some have children from 3 to 6 years old, and others have children from 3 to the second cycle of Primary or the fourth cycle of Primary. What all share is the fact that children from different ages and levels are in the same classroom. HOW IT WORKS Though it seems quite difficult to make things work right , due to the long distance among the schools, the different levels in each classroom and problem of children?s transportation, there?s nothing impossible in our C.R.A. , nothing we can organise. Our aim is to make children can learn establishing relationships between school and their environment. This not implies children isolation, on the contrary; one of our priorities is the interaction among the schools. The planning of common activities, trying children can contribute to the general activity is one of our priorities. As years go by we come to realise this are the main pieces that make things work and encourage our children towards a meaningful learning. Besides, our children are the best ambassadors of our ideas. Ideas that carry to their homes and make families become interested in all our activities. What is very important for us, because we take the ideas coming from the children?s parents, grandparents, etc and put them into practice. WHERE DO WE GO? Now you have an idea of what we are and how we work, it should be convenient to know where we go, the aims in our practice and you should know we want to get the most of our alternatives and our resources , the new technologies and the current pedagogic ideas to work with our students and make them the citizens of the new millennium. We are a rural school , but it does not mean with no resources or old-fashioned. Our children were born in the time of new technologies and they see them as part of their environment. We want our children make the most of them in a creative and active way. One of our objectives is to overcome the physical distance which separates our schools and turn them into a vehicle of communication and exchange. We mean, we want our children and their families to use computers and Internet to create a way of interacting, of working together in the same activities and exchanging ideas and experiences.We intend to make communication through Internet allow us to create language contents : writing tales in all the schools, send comments about the tales, paint drawings elaborated by others. We also intend our library works with its own life, where books, comments of these books, alternatives for the stories and their characters, their beginnings and their ends can be found easily, and we also want our theatre company can have their own components: scenarios, script writers, customs designers, and actors and actress. Though all this can be seen as mere illusions , it is all true. It is a reality we are living in and make us expect even more for the future. At present there?s nothing that prevent us from keeping in touch and work in all schools the same subjects and activities at the same time...and it is only the beginning.