Hungarian-language weekend school and kindergarten in Brussels

Our school was founded 20 years ago by Dr. Ágnes Szabó, who wanted to create a mother tongue community for her own children and the children of several Hungarian families living here, where acquaintances and friendships can be made while studying. Where we can cultivate the Hungarian language with good humor and joy and expand our children's knowledge and awareness of Hungary and the Hungarian language. Where our children learn to read and write in Hungarian and can participate in exciting Hungarian language excursions, museum visits, and obstacle courses, and use their acquired knowledge.

For 20 years now, we have been playing, learning, changing and developing together with many Hungarian children living in Belgium. We do all this playfully, informally, differently than in a traditional school. Using our experience, seeing the needs of families and children, we are constantly expanding and developing our activities. Every year, we offer something new to our children attending our foundation school.

Our enthusiastic group of teachers is the guarantee of our quality work, as they are in similar shoes, their children also participate in our classes. Not only as teachers, but also as parents, they see, monitor and experience our achievements.

Here you can not only learn, but also gain common experiences and grow into a group of very enthusiastic and diverse children from very diverse cultural backgrounds, which helps foster Hungarian identity and provides contemporary, community-based language use for all ages.

We look forward to welcoming all interested parties!

Our permanent programs

Preschool classes for children from 3 to 5 years old

The aim of the Bóbita Hungarian language kindergarten classes is to introduce the Hungarian literary language and develop vocabulary in kindergarten groups. Our main goal is for the children to feel good, relax, and expand their vocabulary. We play, paint, draw with them, learn rhymes and circle games, listen to and process fairy tales together.

Preschool program for ages 5 to 7

In the preparatory year, we consider it important to create a transition between the playfulness of kindergarten and the more formal form of school education. Of course, we are already learning to syllabify and break words into sounds. We learn the printed form of letters and, based on this, how to pronounce them. We help with tongue twisters and playful tasks to master Hungarian pronunciation. The development of verbal expressiveness and vocabulary also plays an important role, which we also help with through dramatic games.

Playing with fairy tales

Storytelling activity for preschoolers and kindergarteners. Children create stories together using word cubes, then process and dramatize them with cartoons, self-made puppets, or costumes. An interesting, twisty game that is a successful way to develop verbal expression and communication skills.

Drama pedagogy

Through drama, situational games, and group dynamic tasks, it helps us get to know each other, ourselves, and how to jointly process the challenges posed by society and the surrounding world. And all this together, cooperating with each other.

Acting and drama classes

"All the world's a stage,

And every man and woman is an actor in it:

"He steps in and out: and many roles await everyone."

In today's world, standing out, having a strong presence and appearance in front of others is very important, but unfortunately, verbal self-expression, individual, improvised speech and text creation in front of others are given less and less importance in school education.

All work is requested in writing, there are no answers in the old sense, only pre-written team work. Don't get me wrong, we're not complaining about the answers, we're just talking about a lack.

Children need self-confidence, a safe, assertive stance in front of others.

We want children to know their boundaries, their voice, have a positive body image, be able to perform, speak in front of others, accept and recognize their strengths, weaknesses and gain practice in standing up, learn to work with others. And of course, be able to use their own creativity.

Since this is a Hungarian school, of course everything is in Hungarian, but the skills acquired can be applied in any language environment.

During the school year, we will select, dramatize, and stage a literary work together, but we will also learn about theater, theater methods, and theater history.

Developmental pedagogy

Small group sessions for developing skills, abilities and language. A methodical, developmental pedagogical session organized in harmony with the other sessions. This session is a great pleasure for us and fills a huge gap, as the development of various partial ability disorders is the most successful and important at this age.

First class

Our first graders master the technique of reading together, focusing on the characteristic Hungarian letters, the first spelling rules, the basics of syllable structure and hyphenation. We practice the interpretation of word structures, sentence formation, sentence segmentation, and develop emphasis and text comprehension. We do all this in a playful way, with a variety of tasks and tools that develop the children's skills and abilities, so that the activities are a joy and not an additional burden for us.

Second, third and fourth grade

We will learn the meaning, usage, types and punctuation of sentences. We will start to create short texts. This is where the curriculum includes text cohesion and the basic units of the text. The most important task of the third grade is to educate students to become writers and readers. We will place great emphasis on developing vocabulary, silent reading speed and comprehension, as well as written text creation.

We continue the work we have started with the fourth graders, creating independent works of writing suitable for our own and each other's entertainment: we write poems, funny, instructive stories, and even dramatize them.

5-6th grade

In this group, the emphasis is on language use. We further expand vocabulary, develop reading comprehension, writing, and spelling.

We begin to get acquainted with literature - here we are no longer just reading young adult novels -, we process János Vitéz, learn the most common poetic images, simpler rhymes and rhythm. We also create poems together and use metaphors, similes and personification.

We read and analyze short stories and poems, and we get to know some important poets and writers. We present their lives with the help of gossip and anecdotes to make them memorable. Such colorful little things leave a much bigger mark on the children.

Hungarian literature, book club, for children over 11 years old

In this activity, we read young adult novels together, which we process together through conversation, debate, dramatization, and writing various journalistic works. Our goal is for the children to learn to express their opinions, acquire the

a culture of debate and various possibilities for processing literary works.

Book club/creative writing

We welcome children who can already write, read, and compose in Hungarian for these classes.

Based on many years of experience, we have come to the conclusion that older children can no longer be taught Hungarian only by learning spelling and grammar, or by interpreting texts in textbooks.

It is much more successful and exciting to teach them to write poems, stories, or even short novels written together in a series.

So, within the framework of this class, we teach creative writing and, of course, analyze and create poems and short stories.

Here, spelling is not the issue (of course, we also deal with that), but the expression of thoughts and feelings in Hungarian. We learn word pictures, literary figures, and the steps and structure of storytelling.

Every year we build the curriculum around a larger theme and we explore this with the works of Hungarian authors, writers, and poets, and of course we also create our own works.

It is very touching to see the children proud of their completed works and happy to read them aloud.

History from 10-11 years old

Someone once said that without a past there is no present, and without a present there is no future, and in order to know who we are, we need to know where we came from, what events shaped us, our family, our ancestors.

This is what history class is about:

About Hungarian history, traditions, legends and fateful events. Sometimes with funny, sometimes anecdotal stories.

In today's world, we are becoming more and more international, our identities are becoming more and more tangled and diverse, but there still has to be some kind of hook, a grip, a starting point, a mother tongue, and history is an integral part of this.

Board game club for ages 10 and up

The aim of the pedagogically based session is to bring together teenagers over 10 years of age in a family-friendly, informal atmosphere, thus enabling them to break away from the virtual world from time to time, without any violence. With the help of guided self-awareness and team-building games, situational games, and board games, we will help them in socialization and in building social relationships. We will guide them on how to cooperate with each other, face their problems, manage them, and solve them. We are waiting for all young people over 10 years of age who are tired of online learning and virtual relationships, who would like to communicate with their friends in person and not via messenger or text messages. Those who would like to have a good laugh and make lifelong friendships, and who would rather say goodbye to their peers with a big hug and a smile at the end of the session instead of pressing the red or delete button 🙂.

Sound Path - complex artistic creative activity with the Kokas method

At the HangÖsvény classes, opera singer and music teacher Ildikó Emese Jakab invites children aged 3-10 on a special adventure, so that they can all experience the combined joy of liberated singing, limitless musical improvisations, community creation, quality music reception and visual education by singing in their native language and playing with our folk songs. No prior musical training is required. In an accepting atmosphere, creativity comes to life, anxieties are dissolved, self-expression and self-confidence develop, and the soul is purified and enriched.