Extra support for kids in Swiss/German

[naturalbaby]

I'm looking for books, magazines, webistes to help my 2nd grader with Deutsch. I have a ton of stuff in English but have no idea what the locals use to support their kids at home. He only gets 1 extra German lesson a week and is falling behind - he reads very well and can do all English curriculum activities for his age but is struggling to do them in German.

Our Grundschule pushes Flohkiste - as a general learning magazine (comes with CD) for 1/2 Klasse. The publisher does follow on titles for subsequent school years. Its quite fun - we never subscribed but the free promotional issues were quite nice and potentially useful.

Our library also has loads of resources and there are always workblocks in stationary shops for every class - Aldi even does "Fit in Deutsche" (and maths) for Grunschule workblocks sometimes.

Do you have any Tiptoi books? My 4 and 8 year old both love them and they do a German for 1 Klasse book here though I don't think anything past 1 Klasse - might be good to catch him up to end of 1 Klasse at least...

I would try Flohkiste and the library.

Obviously all high German. We're in Bavaria and all written work must be HochDeutsche but they do speak in dialect in class - I imagine that (any large amount of class discussion happening in dialect) could be very difficult for children who are newish to both German and the local dialect! Would imagine it is worth speaking to his teacher about that, and hoping you actually have a reasonable teacher willing to listen to you!

I'd second the tiptoi. My DD2 loves hers. We also have several of the Wieso, Weshalb, Warum audio books. If you can find one in a subject that your DS loves (DD1's favourite is about space) then you may find it on permanent rotation.

Thanks for the tips. He's doing local sports where they speak Swiss German, other activities are in English and I'm hopeless at organising playdates with 3 kids and a full schedule!

Think I'll get the the tiptoi as he loves his English tag books. He's enjoying antolin and they mostly watch German channels. They listen to a lot of audio books like Roald Dahl so are reluctant to listen to German audiobooks as we have some really good English ones!

His teacher is German but speaks very quickly and he isn't good at asking for help. He's doing o.k in school with average marks but I know he's capable of much better.