Neue Stifte, neues Maeppchen: new German school thread

[finknottle]

Am starting in positive manner as we're 7 weeks into the new school year and all 3 of mine are settled and happy.
Well, d won't be if she does have head lice and has to stay off because she loves school so much.
S1 is in the second year of secondary & still thriving. Is class prefect for the first time which was a great ego boost.
S2 is in Y4 & has been doing better in class but his test results are still lousy (unfortunate choice of phrase if we are lice-ridden) and his teacher is convinced it's the language issue. He's trying harder which is a good sign. He lost the prefect election by 1 vote to his best friend and was chuffed to bits to be his "deputy" and that so many voted for him.

Had forgotten how wonderful the "erste Klasse" is.

the big problem for your dh will be what work he could get around there since there will be little (if anything) in his direct field I suspect. Shame he doesn't lean towards teaching/have a natural bent for it seeing as how the school specialises in science. From what you have said though, he should probably not go down that track

Actually, I don't think he would be bothered if we lived there and he worked where he has a job as his older brothers and sisters lived abit like that. They had very good bank jobs in Saudi Arabia but they sent their wives and dc to live in the US to get schooling and college. His most honoured uncle (just because he's a physics professor) lived away from his wife too (she was studying Chemistry in Scotland while he taught at uni in Venezuela)- no children but he always talkes about that. Just have to do it in a way that he thinks he's the one suggesting it...iyswim!

would he go over with you at Easter maybe and if you could arrange the dates so the school would be open at least one day during your stay, you could ask him to inspect the school with you (in particular the science facilties). If it is a standard thing in his family for the dh to work away from the family's place of residence, you might well be in luck (if that's how you would feel about living apart)

Lol, no way would he go over with us. He has real pressure anyway to publish. He's been here 6 months nearly and has not even started to get his data together for publication.

He needs subtle hints and non-argumentative chats to convince him it's right to go back.

OK so dd's maths test will/could include:

Multiplikation-lang
Division-lang
Preistabellen

Barzahlung/Ratenzahlungen

Vergrößern und verkleinen (Maßstab)
Zahlenmuster (how I hate these)

So now I have to find a way to get her to revise all that and to feel confident that she can do it.

A 4 (again) for ds in his German test (Bericht schreiben)

Sorry to hear that admylin. I guess that's not going to go down well with h.

What would happen if you cut out the subtle hints and just told him straight that you're going back to the UK with the dc? Do you think it might have to come to that?

Finks, did I get that right - your ds got marked down for drawing a snowman with too small eyes? FFS I think I've heard it all now. Is there some committee somewhere that decides these things. What if said snowman is opthalmologically challanged? I think we should organise a protest march for the rights of small-eyed snowmen everywhere. Oh and for purple dogs while we're at it

Any tips for helping dd to revise? I'v ewritten out a load of sums from her book on most ofth etopics so she#s doing them now.

Really fe dup for ds though. His Bericht was about a boy who was on a bus, his bag was swapped by accident for an identical bag which contained stolen 10,000Euro and he took it to the police station and gave a description of the person who must have swapped bags by mistake, he wa swith his school friends so they also described the thief. Any way he had to find a title and write up the Bericht as if for a newspaper. His title was: Schüler stellen Diebesgut sicher. I thought that seemed OK but teacher wrote Überschrift mißlungen.

How did the revision go admylin? Is she a bit more confident this time?

Has ds got the results of his English test yet?

Yes, ds got a 2 in his English test and would have been a 1 if he'd read the question properly!

Revision didn't go too well, I don't think she could concentrate and she did most of the sums I wrote out for her but didn't seem to give u sthe feeling that we'd advanced or got any where. MAybe i'm doing it wrong. Anyway, same again tonight and every night - first she writes out all the time stables up to 12 , then some multiplicatio, division and a few verkleinern/vergrößern sums. Not sure how else I can get her to revise. Any ideas? How do your dc do it?

Before we sit down to try and revise maths this is what happened to ds today: he had history, and we sat at the weekend doing a massive Zeitleiste with the family names, births, deaths everything we had found out. It was on an A3 paper and filled it completely. The poor lad was told it was far too long and the teacher only wanted a few things aboutds's life. Some dc only had 3 or 4 things on their Leiste.

What a let down, he tries hard and does extra work and then is told it's too long

It sounds at times as if it isn't possible to figure out how to get it right.

I am still digesting the snowmen with the too small eyes really. I think that says it all.

Dd working through some long multiplications now. What else could we do? Did you ever find a good German website for maths practise? (she won't do maths in English!

No my dd didn't really respond to the GErman approach to maths that well. The American books I ordered worked much better for her. It's the same maths just different page lay-out/manner of looking at things in the end.

We did have a German-Deutsch CD-rom for last year but she preferred the German to the maths. I did have her do 10 minutes a day on each. Would something like that appeal to dd? (Bit late for the test)

We had Emil und Pauline, there should be something like that for the 4. Klasse. Or what about the Tipp-program you recommended. When I looked at it on amazon, I saw they have maths/German cd-roms too.

I'm so glad dd never hd to do these German maths tests so I am not talking about something I know about but my guess is if she knows/understands how to do it and the procedure is clear in her mind. I would do maximum 5 examples with her calmly, talking it through, working through step by step.

That's it. Then I would go for a long pleasant walk, let her run around the playground so she is fresh for tomorrow.

I don't know what endless repetititve exercise can achieve really. You know those Matheheft books I was talking about last year where they do page and page of exercises? Well we finished that last year but then I noticed she still hadn't actually got it (FGS)

Oops I'm going crazy! I OWN the maths one - bought it at the same time! Will put that on for her to practise but it only had long multiplication/division and adding and subtracting.

Right now she has to practise the likes of this:
126 l Apfelsaft werden in Flaschen zu 30ml abgefüllt

She has to find out what the question would be and what the answer is of course.

how is supposed to do that? Knock off the zero, divide by 3 and put the zero back?

You can see I don't know what I'm talking about, can't you?

Do you think the maths they do these days is too hard cf what we did?

I mean with put the zero back, you get a decimal point obviously.

Boy who would want to teach maths these days? Could ds help her with her maths, he's been there already so he may have a good way of explaining it?

I've got a feeling it should be 300ml anyway, have you ever seen 30ml bottles of apple juice??

I'm trying to get her to look at 1 l being 1000ml and then to figure out what 100 l is and then 126l. I take it she has to divide 126000 by 30? Can she even do that yet? Must check her old work.

I didn't even notice it was l and ml - sorry.

What fun eh? 12600 divided by 3 = 4200 and put the zero back so 42,000

Makes me feel tired and listless even contemplating it really.

give us another example. I love the thrill of a horror trip into the maths world

That's how I would work it out but I think that's a step too far for dd. She can't figure out the knocking off of 0's etc. Not sure if the teacher has explained it yet either.

I'm just blabbing here really but I rmember that I always hated the word problems in maths at school. The rest was quite straight-forward I think, in any case I never bothered with it much but the word problems always had me totally stumped. Im nachhinein I think it means I was solving problems somehow or other by learning methods off by heart but did not ever understand what exactly it was all about.

This of course put me in brilliant stead for helping dd with modern maths

OK the nest one isn't so shocking!

6 Birnen wiegen 728g und kosten 3,48Euro. Wie viel ungefähr wiegt und kostet eine Birne?

they will have done that admylin multiplizieren mit grossen Nummern they call it . If she has more than one example like that just practice it a bit.

Tell her if she has the two zeros, she can knock them off to get a simpler sum and then once that's done, she has to rmeember to replace the zeros. We had that in Mathe King (do you have that at home, if so have a look) and in the Lerndrache book.