It's getting even better!

I didn't think the comments from the 10year old girl a while ago could be beaten - I mean, what's weirder than imagining I may not come from this world (ok, don't answer that!), but an 8 year old boy today did:
Same question "where do you come from?" but added with the comment, "coz your accent sounds like you come from far away, like my friend who comes from..... Corsham."

Corsham is about 14 miles away from Devizes, hardly a foreign place.
I really do think this can't be beaten, but with children you never know, so watch this space!

Prepositions with Sesame Street

Here is a bit of fun with Sesame Street, or to be precise, Sesamstraße.
Grobi teaches you a few prepositions.

Could I be an Alien?

I have been told that I don't have a typical German accent and most adults only spot a slight accent after a while or when I tell them that I am German.

With children it's different. I am always astonished how quickly they spot that I may not be English. There have been countless incidents in primary schools, when after my arrival in a new class, somebody asks "Where do you come from, Miss?" On my reply "From Devizes" they say "No, where do you REALLY come from?" So I tell them to guess - and they do: Wales, Scottland, Africa, China, Japan..... they clearly have no idea, but usually somebody gets to the word Germany - until the other day!

A ten year old girl wanted to know where I came from and again I asked her to guess. We happened to stand in front of a world map, so she looked at it for quite a while and finally asked me "Is it from this world?"

I could not think of a reply!

German Two-Way Prepositions

'Researching' Youtube I came across my all-time favourite teaching video:






Those two American teachers have done a lot of work trying to explain, when certain prepositions take the dative and when the accustaive - and they've done a brilliant job!

Japanese???

I have just done supply at a Primary School where last year I did a German singing workshop. When the children arrived I asked them if they remembered my name. Nobody did, but one girl put up her hand: "Youre the lady who taught us all those Japanese songs!"

Oh dear!

Have I lived too long in England?

Four Saturdays a term I teach a group of primary school age children at http://www.dssfrome.co.uk/ and the other day we counted in 5s from 0 to 100. That should have been no problem and everything went well up to 50. We counted null, fünf, zehn.....fünfzig, fünfundfünfzig - and this is where the trouble started. I carried on, sechsundfünfig (56), siebenundfünfzig (57), achtundfünfzig (58) ... until one of the children spotted the mistake!

Oh dear, I made the classic mistake many English people make, forgetting to say the units first, then the tens. Of course it should have been sechzig (60), fünfundsechzig (65), siebzig (70), fünfundsiebzig (75), achtzig (80), fünfundachzig (85), neunzig (90), fünfundneunzig (95), hundert (100).