The third and fourth weeks have flown by again.
Last week, the thematic focus in Mrs. Schoeneich’s C1 class was particularly on the topic of renewable energy. The students had been learning about this subject for a long time, so a German TV show called “ZDF” that made a documentary about “green hydrogen” got a lot of attention. Mrs. Schoeneich always chooses topics that are current and important and uses real German materials for her lessons. After having watched the documentary, the class discussed it, and the students wrote an essay about it at home.
This week in Mrs. Wuerfler’s K-1 class, playful work with play-doh was used to practice the clothes, body parts, and colors in the German language. In addition, a vocabulary game was combined with an exercise course. Learning in this way is especially helpful because moving around has been linked to better learning. Since the Aristotelian school of philosophy, people have known that movement helps us store and retrieve information (see Sambanis, Michaela: Foreign Language Teaching and Neurosciences, Tübingen: Narr, 2013, p. 89). The students especially liked running through the course quickly and coming up with as many correct words as they could.
Also, Mrs. Schmelzle’s class for elementary school students used play-doh to teach them about the Spanish number system. This again evoked a lot of joy and motivation!
In Mrs. Schoeneich’s as well as Mrs. Wuerfler’s cooking classes, a lot of goodies were cooked and baked again this week. For Valentine’s Day, the Monday class baked Valentine’s Heart cookies. After the dough was mixed, the cookies were cut out with a cookie cutter, and the cookies were filled with jam. Finally, a stem was poked into the heart-shaped cookie, and the heart foil was wrapped around the cookie on the stem.
The cookies could then be given by the students to their loved ones on Valentine’s Day. A special highlight (besides cookies and okay, of course) was the green egg that Mrs. Wuerfler had brought from her own chicken coop. She explained to the students that the egg was green because the chickens themselves have green feet and belong to the Easter Eggers. Like some students, I had never seen a green egg before.
Last weekend, I visited the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana. I was especially interested in the art that showed how Orange County has changed over time. The Bowers Museum shows how different cultures have shaped Orange County for hundreds of years. One of the best parts was the special exhibition, which had clothes by Gui Pei, a Chinese fashion designer.
