Der Heultopf

Well, we’re home from Ella’s stage debut.

It was about 8 minutes of dialogue and about 28 minutes of...well, I’m not quite sure. For example, plopped right in the middle was an interpretive dance to Simon and Garfunkel’s Sound of Silence.  I never realized just how long that song is.

I dutifully taped the entire thing, but, since it was so long, I’ll only post it if someone really, really wants to see a second-grade Swiss classroom drama project.  But, since I know that there are grandparents out there who are dead curious, though, I did stitch together two and a half minutes of Ella time.

Ella is so proud of herself, and Alex was sweetly proud of her, too, spending most of the show blowing kisses in her direction.

I grabbed a few photos from inside Ella's classroom

I’m glad she had a good end to her day, because she had a difficult middle: she got in trouble for forgetting to take her outside shoes off before going into the classroom (gasp!), so she had to copy a couple of paragraphs out of a book as penance.  Only, she forgot to bring home the book, so she ran back to the classroom to get it after school, only to find the classroom locked. She came back with a very long face. “Mom,” she said, “I. Am. Dead. As. A. Doornail.”

(We picked up the text book before the play tonight.  Ella will live to see another day.)

I thought the blends on the alphabet chart were interesting.

English lessons begin in second grade--Ella's
learning the German words for these.  "And some
English words, too.  Mom, what's a lorry?"

She also asked me at one point today, “Mom, am I weird?”  Well, so does use some funny turns of phrase, but I don’t think that’s what she meant, so I asked her what was troubling her.  She said that some kids were following her on the playground, saying “Hello! Hi! Hello! Hi! Hello! Hi...” and then laughing and running away whenever she said “hi” back.

Poor child.

So I talked with her some about how she could respond, and how they’re probably just interested in her because she’s an American (and the only native English speaker in her school). I think she gets it, and she kind of likes the idea of being an American ambassador. But I know she’s in a very lonely situation. (She also told me she so wishes she could have someone else at her class who really spoke her language: “I have no one to share my thoughts and feelings with.”)

I think she’s coping really quite well, although I suspect I’ll get a few more questions like that. In any case, she’s very motivated to learn the language: “You know, mom, each day I set a private goal for myself to listen for a different word that I know. Today I listened for ‘langsame.’”

Kid, you’ll move mountains.

I really don’t have a feel for how much, if any, language Alex is picking up.  I do hear him singing songs that he’s learned in his classroom, but I honestly can’t tell if he’s even singing the words right.  I do know that, while he’s usually really quite good with names, he has a lot of trouble remembering the names of his classmates, foreign as they are to him: Tiago, Mila, Vida, Linus, Oriana, Nikolaos, and more. He differentiates them by their winter coats: the purple girl, the black-and-white-striped boy, the green guy.

And always comes home chipper. Today he got to go to Ella’s school again for gym class, and, from his description, it sounded like they played dodge ball: “It’s pretty much my favorite game.”

Yep. That sounds about right.