Deutsch Lernen für Alex

Today I got to make good on my promise to Alex, to visit his classroom and sit in on his German lesson.  Dennis was still feeling too sick to go to work, so he and Joey snuggled up for the hour that I got to spend at school.

Dressed for a day in the Wald

But before we left, we had to send Ella off a half-hour early for a day's trip into the woods with her class.  She took her backpack, stuffed with extra warm clothes, as well as snacks and hot dogs and marshmallows to roast over the fire that they'd be making.  When I mentioned that I'd packed those for her, Ella gave a huge sigh: "Oh, thank you for remembering to get me a sausage!  I forgot to remind you, and I would have been in big trouble if I went into the woods without one."  It is the Swiss way.

As we were walking to school, some of Alex's girl friends hailed him, and I asked if he wanted to rush to catch up with them.  "Oh, no thank you, mom. Taking a walk alone with you is very special and I don't want to waste any of it." My word, that boy is smooth.

Alex and I both shook hands with his teachers when we got to school (because I'm totally getting the hang of Switzerland), and then, since we got there a little early, Alex took me for a walk around his new classroom.  

You have to love a room covered with kid art. Alex's flower
is in the middle.  I guess it's a gladiola?

Alex shows me his chair in the circle...right next to the lovely Nora.

Then Alex showed me the big box of Frau Ziegler's rubbish
that the kids are allowed to construct with.  Here he's making
his classmates laugh by making his hair stand on end.

Then Alex pulled me over to the little
playhouse corner to secretively show me
a purse stuffed with play money.  I think he
believes that 1000-franc note is real.

Apparently this is the motorcycle toy that I hear about
each and every day: it's all Alex wants to play with.

I wish I'd taken a picture of the kids playing with Brio trains: the teacher had two laundry hampers filled with tracks and trains, enough to stretch tracks around the room twice over, and Alex assures me they do this almost daily.


As the kids drifted in, they each wandered over to whatever toy they felt like playing with that morning: the room seemed so quiet and content, especially considering it was a classroom of over twenty four- and five-year-olds playing with toys. I was impressed.


But I didn't get to see Frau Ziegler in action, not yet: in early November there will be a parent's morning when we all can go and visit.  But I did get to watch the most marvelous lesson with Alex, three of his classmates, and Frau Jenny.


I taped a bit of it: I particularly wanted to record the good-morning song that Alex has been trying to teach me since the beginning of the school year.  I was hoping that Dennis could translate, but apparently it's in Swiss German, and so parts of it are a mystery to him as well.


Frau Jenny, on Parent's Night, had told Dennis that they do most of their German lessons while playing with two pipe cleaners, and he was completely confused: it turns out that Frau Jenny had fashioned two little dolls out of pipe cleaners to look like the characters in the kids' text books.  That made a little more sense, and I was charmed to see that something so simple and flimsy could be be so exciting for the kids: they all clapped when they saw the puppets sitting on the table.


Most of the lesson was focused on "mine" and "yours": she had the kid pull of their school shoes (called "Finken") and make a Finkenburg out of them in the middle of the table. Then the kids pulled them out, one at a time, and asked around the table, "Is this your slipper?"


I love watching Frau Jenny. She controlled the group firmly but kindly, and made the lesson fun and joyful.  I think she did a wonderful job.

And then she moved on to review clothing articles: I was surprised to learn that Alex knows the German word for pantyhose.

I'll share the video with you, in case you're interested in seeing some good teaching.  If you watch closely, you'll also discover the reason that Alex and Dennis have been chronically sick this year.

Even after all that , I still had time to take Joey to his play group, and we even almost arrived on time.  Susannah has taken control of the group, and I offered to lead the kids in singing at the end of the session.  We misjudged the start time for singing, though, and I ended up singing and dancing with the kids for over twenty minutes. And that was long enough to teach me a lifelong respect for children's librarians and preschool teachers and other cantors of "Itsy-Bitsy Spider" and "The Wheels on the Bus."  I think I may have chosen my songs poorly--I picked ones from a gymnastics class Ella took back when we lived in Berkeley, ones that involved a lot of running and jumping around--for I was completely breathless at the end.



Since Dennis was still home and could greet Alex for lunch (with Ella not returning home until 3:30, still off in the woods), Joey and I snuck over to the nearby farm after play group to grab some milk and cider and fresh-picked apples. On the way home, we stopped at a community center playground that I'd never noticed, but is just around the corner from the farm. It was another really wonderful park, with a little stream running down the middle and all sorts of thing to climb around and hide inside.

When I got home, Alex was there, and Dennis said that Alex had just been telling him what an exciting day at had been at school.  I beamed, ready to hear about how much Alex had loved having his wonderful mother in school with him.  But no...apparently it was exciting because Nora found a dead lizard 83 giant mommy steps away from the school. And yes, that's an official unit of measurement in Switzerland, in case you were wondering.


After I fed the boys, I took them back out of the house so that Dennis could get some more rest.  Susannah had suggested going to the top of Ütliberg, and since it was a brilliantly warm and sunny afternoon, that sounded like a fine idea.

But we had a rude surprise when we got to the top of the mountain: most of that wonderful playground was completely gone, with only woodchips and a few stray pieces of equipment (here a lone swing, there a seesaw) remaining.  They'd taken it all down for renovations: apparently they do make some concessions to safety on Swiss playgrounds, after all.


Regardless, that trip was an absolute joy.  I've written about how close Joey and Alex have become, now that Joey is getting, and it was so fun watching the two of them play with one another, Joey determined to keep up with his older brother, and Alex doing all he could to make Joey smile.  Those are some neat kids, if I do say so.

Susannah and her kids joined us, and we also bumped into a dad from Alex's school, there with his daughter and another classmate.  I'd talked to him a bit before, but had time for a longer conversation today, mostly about the teachers in Alex's class.

I wasn't surprised to hear that Alex wasn't only student terrorized by Frau Simmen last year: apparently his daughter, too, would ask each night if Frau Langen (last year's Friday teacher) would be teaching.  His assessment: "Frau Simmen was a very strange woman: she would laugh, and you would have no idea what she was laughing at."  So maybe I wasn't the only parent that she found hopelessly amusing.  That's oddly comforting.

We got home late, but Ella, as usual, was completely exhausted after her day in the woods.  It's tick season in Switzerland, and Ella had brought home an alarming flier about tick inspection, so Dennis threw her into the bath as soon as she got home.  She was so tired that she was in there, still, when we got back.

With three tired children and a sick husband, I had no compunction at all about slipping in a video for Friday movie night, easing us into the weekend.