Skip to main content

Amish country

Today we're off to the beautiful Hershey Gardens! They've got a really cute scavenger hunt for kids, so Alison is really excited about it.

Last night Patrick and I went out to eat. It was a 45 minute walk to the restaurant and it was nice to walk at normal pace instead of kiddie pace! On the way there, we saw a groundhog or woodchuck.
We also saw some bird of prey, some rabbits, and Patrick kept threatening that he smelled a black bear, which are known to be in the area!
On Tuesday we had a history tour with Grandpa in upstate Pennsylvania. We must have visited about seven different graveyards and traced most of the Bohlayer ancestors back to the original brothers who came over from Laufen am Nekar, Germany. We went up Armenia Mountain and had a wonderful view and saw the family picnic site and where they used to keep the sheep in the summer. We stopped at Bohlayer Orchards and chatted with David and Heather. On the way home, we stopped and saw Jim's cabin and mansion - that impressed Patrick the most! We got home at about midnight after about fourteen hours in the car!! I sure hope I'll retain all that history!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Those Pesky Native Speakers....AGAIN!

The question I most frequently get asked - probably because I grew up speaking English myself and my daughters went through the Swiss public school system - is “how do I deal with native speakers in my classroom?” I will discuss this below starting with my own experiences and then generalize those points to some more practical tips. First of all, I would like to state that I get irritated by the question. Teachers in Switzerland have a 3-year degree in education and a lot of fieldwork. In every subject there will be learners who are more or less motivated, more or less interested, and have had more or fewer experiences in a subject. So when I get asked about native speakers, I think “have they not learned how to differentiate instruction?” and that they have it wrong. Teachers are not responsible for teaching native-level English (they cannot), but they ARE responsible that every child has an active, positive experience where they make progress. They ARE responsible for not just “follo
Post a Comment
Read more

Looking Forward!

What's the difference between "forward-looking" and "looking forward"? An initial thought leads to time: are forward-looking things less probable because they take place in an undetermined point in the future? Are things you look forward to more concrete, in the shorter-term and thus more probable? Who knows - but it is sure fun to think about it!! I am looking forward to this upcoming semester because: I get to teach a lot! My grandfather is coming from the US and we get to go to Lauffen am Neckar ( http://www.lauffen.de/portal ) and take a trip through time. I get to go to the mountains ( http://www.nationalpark.ch/ ) with Ally, Zoe and Patrick. I get to go to the Leonard Cohen concert in Zurich ( http://www.leonardcohen.com/ ) with Patrick! I get to go to the zoo with my students. Somehow it seems a bit simplistic, but isn't it these simple things that keep us happy?
Post a Comment
Read more

The Endless Loop

Today I taught a group of students at the Zurich University of Teacher Education (PH Zurich). I corrected the following utterances: “What means ‘intelligible’?” (should be “What DOES ‘intelligible’ mean?”) “Last year I have gone there, it was great!” (should be: “Last year I WENT there…”) [eye roll] How many times I have corrected these ‘miscues’ or ‘mistakes’? However, did these utterances hinder the students’ ability to communicate? No! Did the students know the rule? Yes! Were they able to correct themselves? Yes! Did they say it incorrectly again after being corrected, made to repeat the expression correctly and write it down to remember? Yes!! What does this example show us? It shows that language is not learned in isolated moments of “learning the present perfect”. It shows us that noticing language takes place all the time, in different contexts. Some things, like the present perfect, are so different from German, that it is only in extended exposure, use in different
Post a Comment
Read more