Last Day of German Kindergarten

Now for this little girl, school was memorable this year and so were her teachers.

Evelyn went to this German Kindergarten up the street from our house, completely immersed in the language with only a couple other English-speaking children in her class. Despite sometimes feeling out of place in the beginning (noting that when her teachers spoke, she heard: "WAA WAA WAA"), Evelyn adjusted nicely and really liked going each day. With four or more hours a day of complete language immersion, she progressed quickly to understand basic instructions and also able to speak a little German. Often at home after school while she and I would work on a puzzle quietly, she'd babble away in German with a combination of actual words and made up German-like gutteral sounds.

Here children go to Kindergarten from ages 3-6 and then start 1st grade, so I tried to convince her to stay another year at this K, knowing that with 12 more months at this school, she'd likely be fluent in at least her understanding of German. But with 2 big brothers at the "big kids school" on post riding the bus each morning, the draw to go with them was too strong. And too, as sweet as it is that this developmental school lets the kids play and play and play until they're over 6 with virtually no curriculum instruction, I also know that Evelyn is ready to learn and ready to go to American Kindergarten. So her short year at this school has come to an end.

So with us traveling most of July and the Kindergarten closed in August, her last day was June 30. This is Evelyn with her primary teacher, Frau Deuschle:



And here she is with her "German teacher" who teaches the English-speakers German, and Evelyn's favorite teacher, Frau Gradinger:

Bye-bye Kindergarten Tilsiter Weg!