By Mr. Loeschengruber, German Teacher.

Students in an international school have many great challenges to master. They learn a lot of exciting and important things in a language that is not their mother tongue.

As the stay of most German children and their parents in China is timely limited, we at CISS help them to better understand and learn to use their mother tongue “German”.

This will facilitate their subsequent reintegration into the German school system when they return to Germany.

At home, of course, the children speak this language with their parents and siblings – so why should we use it to encourage them at school?

There are some fundamental differences between written English and German that children become aware of as they study. In German language we capitalize nouns at the beginning of the word, there are definite and indefinite articles and so many other unknown things to discover for the kids in their mother tongue.

In the weekly lessons with their German teacher Mr. Loeschengruber PYP students get to know their own language better with a lot of joy and commitment.

At the beginning of each lesson there is a warm-up game on the program. Fast reacting and flexible thinking are the main skills to be trained there, for example when it comes to syllables of words or convert whole sentences into movements when climbing stairs. Each step stands for one single syllable.

After the funny start the learning content is deepened and consolidated with the help of German teaching material and a computer program called “Anton”. With this App students can gain “coins” for good performance which they can use to beautify their own avatar or to play small games.

All students are highly motivated and their German teacher really enjoys seeing their great performance, accompany them and support their learning process.