Sommer, Sonne und Hitze - living in Germany thread

[admylin]

'All welcome, Austria & Switzerland & any German-speaking Leute too'

Summer is here at last, now we can complain about it being too hot - when it isn't raining!

Quentin Blake will have places for English speaking dc, you need to call the head directly. What a load of bollocks. They are supposed to have roughtly equal numbers of dc in the English mother tongue and in the German mother tongue group but obviuosly they don't manage it. So fill up the class a bit by taking more German native speakers. New kids go into these schools every year.

A lof of bilingual families (eng-ger) send their dc there and are content. Have heard some hair-raising stuff. Hard to know what to think. Might be the logical choice for your family though.

Nelson Mandela would be harder to get into I think but you are right they have this policy about highly mobile families. You will have fun with the head though, unless he has changed, have never heard anything very flattering about him. I suppose you just have to try. Would totally bypass their secretarial staff. Friend of mine teaches at that school come to think of it, German teacher. She doesn't send her own dc there. It does have a nice interantional mix that school, grounds nothing great, school building etc. I think they still have a lot of building work going on, might be done by Feb though and therefore not so loud.

If you are only there for 4 months, probably they will all be ok. Longer term you have different worries IYSWIM. I would personally take the JFK over the NM but see what you think of them all.

BBIS - Berlin Brandenburg Inter School is exp and I don't know , you'd probably have to pay for a full year. No idea. BIS - used to be called Kant Schule and is now the Berlin International School.

there is also the Charles Dickens Europa school which is centre - West and not really convenient if you live in the South. It is located in Charlottenburg in the area Neuwestend and is the same type of Europa-schule as the Quewntin Blake. Same curriculum as QB, NMS.

I think they have also opened a new one in Charlottenburg , will have a look

here

what about this one? New set up. Two Spanish girls my dd knew went there but I never asked about the school at all so no idea what it is like. Gnerally Montessori is nice I think.

In our primary in Berlin they had a few non German speakers join mid year and they took them out of class a couple of lessons a day to have German lessons and the rest of the time they seemed to just sit at the back and coast along.

I suppose if it's really just a short term stay you could take a look at the standard primary schools around where your dh will be working as it's a nice area anyway. Then your dd will atleast have a real German experience!

It'S 365 degrees today, same forcast for tomorrow. I hate this heat. Still have a pile of ironing to do but it'll have to wait until the weekend now.

365 degrees! Day trip to some nasty planet?

See how tired I am , my finger probably slipped, it's so humid!

Anyway, 35 degrees should be in Texas or India or something but not northern Germany, it's not right.

lol will be a desert in a few years I reckon

when is the big move?

In about 2 weeks although I haven't even booked the removal firm or started seriously packing yet. I've just sort looked at it all and thought about doing things.

good luck iwth it. Why not just take the same guys you used last time?

They've disappeared, deleated their info online.

I'm inviting a couple of firms round next week to assess and give me a reasonable quote although the ones I already had a quote of 1000 euro from, will not be coming.

The Quentin Blake is going through something of an existential crisis at the moment and has neither a head nor a deputy head. Don't really want to say more about it on a public thread. However, they don't have a problem at the moment getting enough English speakers for the English half, and in fact the current first grade has three classes instead of the normal two. The language testing has also got a lot more tough than it used to be, to weed out kids who are really German native speakers but whose parents claim they are English.

What class are your DC going into? My DD's class will be third grade next school year and there are quite a few places in the class, partly because a few families moved abroad and partly because three kids are having to repeat the year.It's really a matter of luck.

ZZZen mentioned the Montessori nursery in Dahlem - there are actually two very close to the QB (so very near the FU). One is a large bilingual one run by a freie Träger (my daughter went there for nearly 4 years and had a great time) and the other is a small, private one that only uses English. I phoned them by chance the other day about a translation matter and they were really friendly.

The Charles Dickens in Charlottenburg is theoretically identical to the QB, but is generally acknowledged to be not as good and certainly more German influenced. It's got an excellent new head, though (they snaffled the QB's old deputy head) who seems to be improving things.

To be honest, your chances of getting into the Nelson Mandela are pretty low. They're massively oversubscribed at the moment and I've heard of a lot of English only families being rejected recently. Lol at your description of the head, ZZZen, he's a bit, um, gewöhnungsbedürftig. A friend of mine taught there and transferred because she couldn't stand him.

Chances of getting into the JFK as a non-American and without having been to the nursery are essentially zilch.

If you decide to go for a German-only school in Zehlendorf, they're just about all good, but the Nordgrundschule and the Erich-Kästner-Grundschule have got very good reputations, and Sankt Ursula if you want to go Catholic.

Gosh, I seem to have accumulated a ridiculous amount of surfeit information about the Berlin school system over the last few years...What a waste of brain cells.

We are moving to Bonn does anyone have any info on how to get a house without paying huge makler (sp) fees? Any ideas gratefully received. Or if this is not possible which websites show all properties available.

Thanks in advance.

Thanks again for all the really helpful info.

DD1 has only just turned 6 - she's just coming to the end of yr1 (i.e. end of her second year at school) - would that mean she would be in second grade next year? DD2 is only little, just turned 3, so not school age yet.

Another question if you don't mind - if we went for the option of being more out in the sticks (since dp doesn't have to be in every day), do you think there's any likelihood of being in a lovely small community with a cutesy cosy Grundschule, or am I being totally pie in the sky?

could you advertise in a local paper juststrudel, so houseowners contact you directly?

I am wondering if your dd is only going to be 6 when you arrive in Berlin whether you could get away with not sending to her school in Germany. I don't know what the current Berlin rule on this is but you used to be able to defer entry , in whihc casethey could both stay home with you and you maybe do a bit of work with dd in the monrings and then all go adventuring/exploring or they could even both go to a German kindergarten for the 4 months and might pick up a fair bit of the language. More than at school I would imagine tbh.

starting age used to be 7 you see. Children who were 7 in Sept. Then they changed it 2006 to 6 but with the possiblity of leaving it for another year.

Dunno now what the rule is though.

Juststrudel - we found our house by putting an ad in the local paper before we moved over - we got quite a few replies. I dont know the Bonn area so cant help anymore - sorry!! But i spent the weekend there once and really liked it!! When do you move? Do you speak german?

isn't Emkana from Bonn? Not sure. Maybe she could recommend a paper to advertise in, if you'd like to go down that route. Can't remember having seen her post on MN for a long time though.

juststrudel - I have a friend in Bonn who I could ask if you like. When will you be moving there?

ZZZen - the rules have got a lot more strict in the last few years. Now kids HAVE to go to school in the calendar year they turn 6, and there are essentially no exceptions. So if a child's birthday is December 30th, they will be in the first grade in August at the age of 5 years and 8 months. My DD wasn't affected by this as she is a May child, but the teachers have told us that they've had to 'lower' their expectations for the first grade as a consequence. It's no coincidence that the three kids who are being kept down a year are among the youngest in the class.

If your DD has just turned 6 now she would be coming into the first grade next February, not the second grade. That explains why there are no places - all the spaces have been filled at the interviews and no family has yet moved away - that seems to happen at the rate of at least 2 families per year per class.

Someone mentioned Phorms in the south of Zehlendorf. All I know is that a friend went to work there as a superviser (Erzieherin) and left a few months later because it was so chaotic. It's one of those schools for germans who want to learn English rather than for English-speaking families.

Sticky - you'd want to be very careful about landing up in the sticks. We're talking Brandenburg here, which has a notoriously low standard of education and a lot of ex-communist teachers still. DH teaches in higher education there and is less than complimentary about the whole system. OK, the houses are cheaper, but the people are very, very rough diamonds.

Potsdam is lovely though, the people are a bit more sophisticated, and it has better schools in the centre. And there's a bilingual private school:

www.is-potsdam.de/home-en.html

There's a local S-Bahn train through to the FU, or it's 20 minutes by car.

There are quite a lot of English families living in Kleinmachnow, adjacent to Zehlendorf, but they ALL send their kids to Berlin schools or the nearby BBIS (Berlin-Brandenburg International).

"the people are very, very rough diamonds

thanks for updating my info on schools/ages etc! How do you mean they're rough diamonds? No real exp. Potsdam has a Montessori that gets good reviews but once again if she is going into German grade 1 very diff to still get a place.

did you mean they're abit scratchy and nfriendly or more seeped in the communist mode?

Both.

You know the Berliners have 'Herz mit Schnauze' - well it's like that but with a bit less heart.

Thanks for all your replies - will be moving mid-August but plan to go before and find somewhere then. Will google local papers - and yes I speak a bit of German - was in Wien for nearly 9 years.

good luck Strudel.

Engel, That doesn't sound like sticky's "lovely small community with a cutesy cosy Grundschule" , lol and OMG Schnauze with less
heart than Berlin is really for Hartgesottene.

I think something will work out with the schools sticky. Your problem is twofold, saying you will be therejust for a matter of months and trying to join a bilingual now when the places for next year, year 1 have been allocated. Have you asked when they fob you off, if they could put you on the waiting list?

So what do you have, move into somewhere and go register your address. Soon after that ('d imagine, they'll inform you which school you have or you call the Schulamt and ask). Go in and register your dd there. If they cannot take you, you'll be allocated a school no fussing about looking yourself.

If you don't like that schoola nd you did not get a bilingual one, you can try a faith school which is essentially private (which does not mean exp). You apply directly to the school (you could also do that now).

Or if all else fails, you can do what someone suggested (was it Blauerengel?). she has been offering you very good advice I thought: live in Prenzlauer Berg (EBerlin) and send your kid to the private bilingual - Metropolitan, Cosmopolitan or Kids Internatial. QWouldn't want to live there myself but for 4 months might be more interesting than a quiet residential place. Hard to say.

Friend of mine taught at Cosmopolitan and she said reception/year 1 is nice. It's true you're going for some of th least attractive months in the year and being out in the wops might be boring. At least in P. Berg, you can go out at night and so on. Better than being stuck in a house in the backend of beyond when it is dark in the mornings and dark from 4pm. Grim.

Can anyone else not sleep because of the heat? My dc are still up and wide awake because it's so warm in our flat. We've got all the windows and balcony door open but there is no breeze.

I'm also ashamed to say dd and I drove round the corner to the very near by supermarket in our air conditioned car to stay cool.