Solar Meninos de Luz

By Rena Pokharel

Solar Meninos de Luz is a community school in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil containing a nursery and K-12 students. This school offers formal and continuing education to be able to send them to college and have careers, cultural activities, sports, and health care. It is also known as a civil and philanthropic organization as well. Solar De Luz is more than a school as it offers kids family programs like daycare when parents are at work and providing many supports to families as well. 

We visited and took a tour around the school. There are multiple buildings: high schoolers, middle schoolers, and elementary schoolers, and the nursery has separate buildings. For the most, we saw classrooms of different grade levels from nursery-12. We checked out the children's library containing books that remind me of my childhood and a computer lab. From there, we did get to check out classrooms of what kids are learning such as there are kids learning english, and kids doing art projects. We also checked out a tennis court and saw kids lined up in karate uniforms in their martial arts session. We also got to peep through a window and saw girls in their ballet lessons. Then, we walked to another area of the building and saw classrooms of babies. They were playing around while some were asleep. They are so adorable. We also got to check out a health care room where kids go to when they are sick, need to see a dentist, and when they need to see a psychologist.

I, overall, enjoyed the tour, observing kids in their class and their extracurriculars. I found it very interesting for a school to have a dentist room and a psychologist room. During my K-12 years, I never had these rooms in any of my schools. The schools I went to were small nurse rooms containing beds and offices. My elementary, junior high, and high school were only one building while that school contained multiple buildings but a lot fancy looking.