I wanted to share a few cute pictures from the three English days that we had this week (sans kids of course...sorry...) because we always get to do really fun things. One of the complications with our school is that our vacation days are different-the German calendar gives more days off during the school year, and we get a longer summer. So our solution is to have "English days" and "German days", when only the mother tongue speakers come to school. So for three days this week, while the German students were on their Herbstferien (fall break), my 11 English students and I had school. The kids love these days, because there isn't the added pressure of having to think in both languages throughout the day. Their little brains get a break. :)
Plus we do fun stuff. It's a chance for me to have more flexibility with my teaching schedule (when you teach all day you get to choose when you do things!), more time for curriculum related activities, and time to teach "American" themes that might otherwise be left out.
Since it's fall, I decided to use pumpkins to teach the students about scientific observation and graphing results. We split into groups, looked at and measured a pumpkin, and of course cut it open to count all the seeds!
I also decided to teach my students about area and perimeter, since it would reinforce the multiplication facts we've been working on. I'm going to take this opportunity to brag about my kids just a little bit. My English speaking students were able to understand the concepts of area and perimeter (with difficult shapes requiring multi-step problems) in just three days. Our last fun project was to design a robot using graph paper and then calculate its area and perimeter-they rocked it! And of course we had waffles, because it's fun to turn delicious food into math. :)
Cultural side note: It's common in the American math system for students to learn how to solve math problems on paper, and to show their work. We're not as good with the mental math. This is how I learned to solve problems, and I admit that sometimes I still use my fingers (guilty). But here in Germany, they're taught to have an incredible number sense and can solve multi step problems mentally. It amazes me. So we talked about this as we solved our area and perimeter problems this week, because as I showed my kids (English speakers, many of whom have grown up in Germany and are virtually bilingual) the equations that I'm so used to using (P=L+L+W+W and A=L x W), they struggled to understand why they needed to write these equations down and show their work when they could simply look at the shape and give me the answer. Smart kids. We eventually decided that we can appreciate both ways to solve problems and that neither are right or wrong. We're so lucky to be able to learn and solve problems in both ways.
All that to say, we really do miss our German friends and teachers during English days, and anxiously await their return on Monday. It always seems like part of our class is missing, which of course it is.
