Majinwa Ireland, Guten Morgen Deutschland

Today we went to Germany with Christine upstairs and Ireland with David and Nanako downstairs. When Christine came into the classroom we learnt how to say good morning in German which is “guten morgen”. “Ich heisse Ava said our friend Ava and then she and Christine asked us if we knew what country the language that they were speaking was from and we said: “Germany”. Yes they said! Ava pointed out where Germany is on an inflatable globe. It is a very large country that is a part of Europe. We learnt how to count to ten in German: Ein, zwei, drei, vier, funf, sechs, sieben, acht, neun, zehn. Some of the words in German have two little dots on top of them. The letters are a, o, and u. There is a funny letter that looks similar to a B but it isnt a B and when you read it, the sound that it makes is like the letter “S”.

  We learnt that Germany is very famous for cars. The kinds of cars that come from Germany are Mercedes Benz, BMW, Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche. These are all very good cars so we think that people in Germany make really good cars.

Another thing that Germany is famous for is castles. People lived in real castles a long time ago and many of the castles are still standing especially because they built them with big bricks so that they would be strong and stand up when used in battles. We looked at many different pictures of castles and some looked just like the Disney castle that most of us know about. Many of the characters in fairy tales that we know such as Cinderella, Snow White etc. lived in castles like these. We saw a picture of “Bruonweis Castle” which is from Christine’s home town in Germany. The castle is built on a hill and when you go up into the tower, you can see a long way into the distance. The owners of the castle, protected the village people when bad people came.

So what do people eat in Germany? Ava told us that they like to eat hamburgers, sausages and pretzels. Christine gave us a delicious snack of sausages and ketchup and we also tasted real German pretzels. We learnt that “Dankeshun” is the way to say thank you in German. Christine then gave us an amazing activity to do – make a coloured castle. We each had a piece of white paper and a selection of coloured castlelike shapes. There were walls, towers and gates and we could design on our castle and paste the pieces onto our piece of paper. You can see what they look like in the photo. Before we went on our German trip with Christine, we had an activity at one of the tables with styrofoam cut into the shape of a castle tower and wall. We also had cardboard, tubes, blocks of wood and tape and glue. We looked at pictures of a selection of castles from around the world as well as Japanese castles. We put many of the pieces together and will work on them again tomorrow.

We want to say a huge “Dankeshun” to Christine for the wonderful lesson on Germany; the activities and snack and everything. We loved our time learning about Germany today. Downstairs we went to Ireland with David, Luka’s dad and Nanako, Luka’s mum who is also one of our teachers. We learnt that in Ireland, while people speak English the Irish language is a language of its own. Hello is “Majinwa”.

We decorated the map of Ireland with green markers and wax crayons and then pasted green collage materials on top of our drawing. When people think of green and a country, they think of Ireland.  After we had completed the map, we put it on our chalkboard, and then we sat at our activity tables to make potato heads. Irish people love eating potatoes.

They eat mash potato, french fries, baked potatoes and more. The potatoes that they brought to school were so enormous and to start, Nanako and David scooped out a little part of the inside and made the base flat so that the potatoes could stand. We made one potato head man and one potato head woman. We put eyes on them, a nose and a mouth and the man has a moustache. We then placed some white cotton pads into the holes that had been scooped out and Nanako and David added water to them so that the cotton pads were wet. We sprinkled some grass seeds onto the cotton pads and now we wait. What will happen? Will something grow?

    We played a wonderful game which reinforced counting in English and we learnt the Irish words for the numbers up to ten. Again, they are quite unusual and we were interested to see how much Irish Nanako’s knows. She said that she has been to Ireland many times. We learnt how to count in Irish with a selection of pictures inside circles. There was one picture of Luka, two pigs, three green hurley fields and hurley sticks, four rabbits, give cups of tea, six breads, seven cows, eight horses, nine shamrocks and ten potatoes. All of these things are famous in Ireland, even Luka chan! If you want to learn how to count in Irish, here goes:

Ahayn, adoh, atree, akahur, akui, ashay, ashokt, ahokt, anui and ajeh. The pronounciation is a bit tricky. Afterwards we learnt how to do the Hokey Pokey using some Irish words viz. right foot is kuss juss, left foot is kuu kleh, right hand is love juss and left hand is love kleh and tufay is your whole self. Nanako read a book called “I love you” which many of us probably have on our bookshelf at home. It is written by a famous Irish author called Sam Bratney.

  After all of our activities, we sat down for snack time and ate our snack. However we had one more Irish treat which apparently the Irish stole from the British and that is trifle. Nanako made it for the first time and it was so delicious. It had fruit, cake, jelly and cream on top. Once again, a huge thank you to David and Nanako for preparing such wonderful activities and things for us to do and learn about. We really have had an amazing time, tasting so many different foods from other countries and learning about many different countries. We have two more countries that we are going to be doing downstairs this week viz. Germany on Thursday with Carolin, Liam’s mum and South Africa on Friday, with Shelley.

Wishing you all a great night and see you tomorrow.

Love always, Shelley, Darren, Hisami, Ayaka, Liezel, Goh, Christine, Maryna, Sharee and Rama