(Imaginary) Trip to Germany
A couple months before the end of Tobin’s final year of preschool, i finally got around to something i had on my mind since Mika went to the same school: take the class on an imaginary trip to Germany! I am not sure if the kids still carry “passports” like they used to, but Sabine and i teamed up to represent our homeland … big time. We took the class via slideshow across the country, from north to south. The trip started at the waterfront near Bremerhaven. We took a famous sailboat to Hamburg, and the ICE to Berlin. We went on a short, age appropriate discourse about the Berlin Wall, before we continued our travels via Autobahn through the countryside. The kids got to see many cities, typical landscapes, local foods and traditional clothing. The last part of our trip was dedicated to famous castles, segueing to Grimm’s fairy tales (a well known topic in our audience). All 26 kids stayed focused until the end, and we rewarded them with a silly dance to Germany’s 2011 kid music video sensation “Schnappi“.
Below is a movie version of the slide show. It’s lower in resolution than the Powerpoint file and the colors are a little washed out … but this one has a soundtrack. During our live presentation, we took turns narrating each section and answered numerous questions.
PS: if the airplane in the video looks familiar, it’s because i used a photo of Omi Hiltraud’s birthday travel coupon as a base for the school’s colorful plane.
Posted in Daily Musings, Photos, Videos
Fredster responded on May 4th, 2012 at 6:30 am
Haha, this is awesome! As longtime expats you do of course have a pretty romanticized idea of Germany by now… ;-)
ninja responded on May 4th, 2012 at 9:44 am
Guilty as charged ;-)
A 2-3 year old crowd of completely uninitiated non-Germans is the only audience where we could get away with it. It was a lot of fun though, and brought on a little Heimweh in both of us.
All the kids’ teachers now want to travel to Germany, except for the head teacher/owner of the school, who hails from Poland. Just kidding. But i did put a lot of thought into how to talk about the Berlin Wall, or whether we should just leave the WW2 topic out altogether.
In the end, the story went like this: Once upon a time, there was a very bad guy who started a war with many countries around Germany. Lots of people got hurt and cities were destroyed. The countries fought back and the bad guy lost. To make sure Germany could not start any wars again, the winning countries separated it into two smaller countries. Berlin, the capital, got separated by a wall. Many years later, with everybody living peacefully, the two German countries really wanted to come back together. The people started demonstrating – peacefully – until the wall was taken down and everybody reunited. Followed by the slide of Tobin swinging next to the remaining, colorful segment of the wall. That was about as much as they could process, but i am glad we mentioned it.