Friday's photo club

I'm glad to have some photo fans at school, who love to meet me once a week, learn something new and make pictures, pitures & pictures!

I'm no photographer or proffessional, but this passion for taking pictures, evaluating them and looking at the good ones are common features that my students and I have. And if there are only a few tricks I can teach them, than I'm happy to do so.

So far we haven't done much, our topic for the beginning is composition. Yes, it's not only important to make pictures and pusch the button at the right time, but also find the best place to place youself or make as many shoots as possible. The first two topics for shooting were 'Christmas' and 'colorful'... And I still don't have much pictures to show, but I can do it with some :)

In the future I'd like to go through basic settings for camera, play with shutter, apperture, ISO and so. As well some basics of street photography, lomography, B&W, macro... and we'll see what else and to what extend.

I love this picture - it's Annica feeding animals and trying to get them out of their shelter and Rike making the best shot possible. As I can see, we can also learn to cooperate and help each other during these lessons...

AND you wouldn't believe how passionate can pupils be about learning when it's something different from everyday, when it's about themselves...EVEN AFTER THE NORMAL SCHOOL LESSONS.

These are pictures by Rike, who had in her mind "I have to follow the rule of the thirds, I have to think of composition, middle is not interesting in this case" :)

And I think she did well. Remember, these pictures are not ment to win shooting competition, they are not post processed and they are made by 14-year-olds.

Here, again, very nice pic of a typical German (also Scandinavian) Christmas decoration - the Herrnhuter Stern...

Happy to have managed to take a pic of some animals. Not straight but I think very nice job!










Right, I should capture the posters hanging at school, saying 'come to our photo club'... Even the head teacher was asking whether I or my mentor mad it. Well none of us. Kids who are interested. And who, again can become very passionate if you give them the idea and the chance to do what they like.

cooking ♨ believe it?

An interesting and important part of the school's life here, are cookery classes. Well yes, you're not misreading!
Sometimes I walk in the corridors and I can smell beautiful sweet smell of Christmas cookies (Plätzchen). That's when one can't resist and must knock on the door and out of curiousity "check" what's happening. So in the same way I'm about to bake Slovak Christmas cookies with some classes next week - again, great way how to bring one's culture to the pupils.

However, that will not be the first time me cooking at school! The 10th class wanted me to cook some typical Slovak food with them... So out of time and ingredient availability I decided for "harula" - Slovak potato pancakes with cream, cheese and cucumber :)

My students had to do everything from peeling the potatoes, through grating them, adding all the ingredients, cutting onions, to frying in the pan. And then cleaning the place and washing the dishes. And of course, eating the food :)

I consider this subject amazing. Not only many of the children learn basic cooking tricks, but also many of them learn, there actually IS real cooking. And finaly they have to clean everything, so I think it's just great learning for life! 

BTW, this is a great opportunity for those who just aren't that great with other subject. I had there one boy, who's terrible at maths, languages and so, but he loves cookery classes and he was cutting onion like a wizard!

Yep, I'm looking forward to the next week and baking with the 8th class!

Vianoce ☃ Zima ☃ Snehuliak ☃ Mikuláš

Unfortunatelly I've seen snow here only for about 10 minutes since I came here. Like all over Europe, in northern Germany too, there's autum weather. However the calender shows 9th December and it means winter season!! The Christmas is coming, I'm listening to Christmas songs, we're doing a Chritmas e-twinning project and I'm sooooo looking forward to going home and enjoying the best time of year :)

Inbetween we've done some Christmas or Nicolaus things with my pupils in many classes:
So for example, my Slovak class learned how the Slovak Mikuláš looks like, and that he comes on the 6th together with Čert (devil) and Anjel (angel) and they either give sweets to nice kids or some potato or coal to the naughty ones.

Here, my pupils drawing and learning about the Slovak trio:                      

They also learned two lines from a famous song about the Nicolaus:


Pred oknom, za oknom, stojí Mikuláš,
                     povedz nám deduško, čo v tom koši máš?






Other classes learned a song about a snowman, despite having no snow to play with... And some of the pupils were really good at guessing the meaning of words. Anyway, Slovak is such a difficult language for Germans even to read, so I was happy when they rememberd how to say snowman, cap, friend and pipe. The last word only because of it's resemblance to German word Pfeife - Slovak fajka :)
However they were having fun and I learned that I have to speak everything out loud before anybody's able to read anything in my language.
Here some pictures of snowman song class with some Christmas motives:

The song:

Kde sa vzal, tu sa vzal,pri záhrade ráno stál,
čiapku sivú, hlavu krivú
a fajku vám v ústach mal.

Ref.:
V košieľke, neborák,
čože je to za panák?
Zasmiala sa mladá chasa,
jaj, veď je to snehuliak.

Hopsasa, kamarát,
poďže sa ty s nami hrať,
hádzať sniežkom,
dolu briežkom
veselo sa sánkovať.

Ref.

Without any doubt were the most popular parts of the song "hopsasa kamarát" and "jaaaaaaj, veď je to snehuliak" :)

E-twinning "Christmas at us"

It's the beginning of December and our e-twinning project is luckily coming to it's end.

We were asked to prepare presentations about Christmas in our countries. There are 6 countries taking part in it: Slovakia, Czech rep., Poland, Estonia, Turkey and Germany. Obviously, I'm responsible for the German part, despite being Slovak :) However, this is also a way how to bring my culture to my German pupils.
So my puils have worked hard to describe their food, customs, markets and much more. I think they have a great advantage of speaking the project language as natives, since all schools participating, must make their presentations in German.
Here's a picture from how we estimated the topics and decided who would do what:

We've decided to do this project with the 8th class, since they are at the age closest to the other countries, and at the same time, they should learn about making resentations.
The pupils are paired into groups of two and are given interesting topics. Pity is, that we can only work on this project once a week for 45min., but the kids are doing their (almost - as usual) best and some are already done! Next week we should complete the unfinished ones and also make a selection of our favourite Christmas songs. I'll upload some presentation or the link to the web site where they'll be stored.
Looking forward to that :)

Prehistoric day ❉ Urmenschentag

Only two days after my arrival in Blankenburg I took part on a trip to sand caves, where kids form the 5th classes acted like prehistoric people, since this is the historic era they are dealing with this school year.

Many of them were wearing prehistoric costumes with fur and funny things.



We built around 6 groups and they then walked from place to place doing like prehistoric people did. So, real learning by doing took place in here.





On one place they painted the "caves", on the others they made their own accessories, or weapons and tools.

They also tried to build a "house" using only wood and string, we also prepared ourselves for hunting and made simple bread using our hands, water and flour. Finally all were rewarded with a bun and sausage and went home happily :)

This week I managed to work with some of the fifth graders and summarize all we did on that day together with means of pictures, writing and memories. Here you can see some of the posters they made... I say: nice!

The actually teachers played their roles really great! And since it was cold like hell, we were all delighted to stay near the fire and to warm up our frozen hands.











I really really loved those costumes the kids had!!! And no wonder they looked that good when the reward for the best ones was a 1 grade from history ;)

Comenius

Well, it's been now a month since I came to Germany to work as a Comenius assistant... So now I'm quite used to living alone, speaking German every day, being cold and I decided to write this blog to keep people up to date with all my projects and work I do at the School.