Vecka 50

Time to say good-bye...

Christmas is just around the corner, and especially because of this and the snowy Swedish winter, we got infected by the happy Christmas mood at Gripsholmsskolan. Unfortunately, this also means that our time in Mariefred will soon come to an end.

We enjoyed our stay here so much that we actually did not notice how fast time was running. This blog entry is way too short to tell about all our experiences at Gripsholmsskolan. Nevertheless, we would like you to get an insight into the most important things we did.

From the very first day on we have been integrated into the everyday school life. We taught English in Christel’s, Stefan’s, Jessica’s and Linda’s classes. – This may seem pretty unspectacular, but for us it was a great way to gain more experiences in teaching and learn to cope with everyday classroom situations. We are so very grateful that we were always welcome to the classes and that we could learn so much!

We also took part in Stefan’s and Linda’s sports classes. It was always fun to assist them and to experience so many different kinds of sports. Athletics, dancing, running, orientation, handball, football, gymnastics, acrobatics, skiing... we had it all!

As we did with all the pupils, we, of course, also did our fitness-test with grade 4 and 5. We hope you enjoyed it☺

Besides our regular classes, there were other things that kept us busy ☺ When Nina told us that there would be around 15 students from grades 4 and 5 who wanted to learn some German, we were both curious and excited about that - as it was the first time for us to teach German. We knew that it should not be a proper language lesson but rather a German-club with which we wanted to arise some interest for the language. We hope we reached our goal ☺

Of course, we started with presenting ourselves in German. But we also learned some basic vocabulary like colours, numbers, animals and clothes. Since we always tried to make our lessons a bit of fun, we used to sing a lot of German songs as well. “10 kleine Fische” seamed to be their all-time favourite ☺

It’s so nice to hear them singing that song after the lesson or during the breaks. It makes us feel we did something worthwhile!

In one of our last lessons we talked about the weather. Students prepared their own weather forecast for Germany. In some places the weather turned out to be really crazy- Thank God, we haven’t been in Germany at that time ☺

Here Zachary is (very enthusiastically) presenting the weather forecast for Germany for the next day ☺

During the last four weeks we also hopped in as "engelska hemspråk" teachers. Obviously, English is not our mother tongue but we, nevertheless, enjoyed teaching this extra lesson very much. It was a great experience to be with this group since the children were from many different classes. We concentrated mainly on group activities and did a lot of conversation exercises. We, for example, revised how to tell the time or how to give directions in English.

When we discussed the compass we talked about the different English-speaking countries all over the world. We were also taking a closer look to where on the map they actually are in relation to Sweden.

Now that Christmas time is coming up we thought it would also be nice to make some Christmas cards which the children could give to their English-speaking relatives.

Besides "engelska hemspråk" we also taught "tyska hemspråk".

Since there aren’t so many German-speaking children at Gripsholmsskolan, Kevin and Laura had our full attention during tyska hemspråksundervisning. We will miss the nice time we spent learning about German letters and grammar, writing stories, reading poems and playing games.

As you can see, we had a wonderful time here at Gripsholmsskolan. We can’t believe it is already time to go home. Our studies are awaiting us back in Germany but actually we would much rather just stay here. We got really attached to everyone here and it won’t be easy for us to leave it all behind. We wish you all “God jul” and a great holiday. We will come back as soon as we can.

Tina and Lisa <3