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

Should we have English in the primary/elementary school here in Switzerland?

There are just my rough thoughts on English in the Primary / Elementary Schools in relation to the age and acquisition discussions going on. I add no references, will do so later. *** The question about there being a critical age (or not) for the acquisition of a foreign language has long been discussed and we will leave this discussion to the true experts (Birdsong, Singleton, Pfenninger, etc…). So let us assume that they are right and that English for the sake of English has no place in Swiss elementary schools. I can agree with this. It is clear to me that there is no point in having English at the elementary school level for the sake of language competence in English itself. However, there are reasons for having English at the primary school which might make sense. These reasons could be that: a child’s metalinguistic awareness is augmented (proof ?) by having an early language; a child knows German or his or her mother tongue in a different way than a child who has no acce...
Post a Comment
Read more

Problem based learning

Last night I was wondering about two things: working interdisciplinarily and also problem based learning. About interdisciplinarity : On a superficial level, most things are interdisciplinary. If you teach English, you are also teaching things related to culture, to "self" and to many other topics. If you teach M&U, you are also teaching language, you are also teaching math, etc. However, if the school system is based on specific subjects having 45 minute blocks and there is this concept of teachers having a profile (some do English, some do art, some do French - but not all), on a feasibility level, this interdisciplinarity remains on this superficial level unless teachers really make an effort to network. So on the level of strategies, how do you have a strategy-based approach with the children in one subject and then ensure that they are transferring the strategies that they "train" to other subjects? Of course it's possible, but it's more complex due...
Post a Comment
Read more