A month ago, our 5-year-old daughter started her final preschool year at a new school, one with a program for native speakers of German. She has one hour of German class each day, and the other week she came home with this cute rhyme:

Another holiday day: one day, I came to pick up my daughter from the holiday resort’s kids club, and when I checked in, I was told she was in the puppet corner. There she was indeed, playing out a puppet story to a captive audience* – in German! * an audience of two, but that […]

Summer holidays are full of fun and an occasion to try out new things. When on the third day in our German holiday resort, the kids in the surrounding holiday homes were outside playing after supper, our 5-year-old decided she wanted to join them on skates. (She’d only skated once so far.) So that’s what […]

If you have read my guest post Bilingual Travelers: Sweet Exposure to Language and Culture in Germany over at Bilingual Monkeys about last year’s summer holiday, you will have noticed the minority language gets a boost with food. This year is no different. On our first day in the holiday resort, I’d forgotten to give […]

Yesterday, my 5-year-old daughter and her German grandma (Oma) settled down to watch a Garfield cartoon. My daughter told Oma: “If Garfield is in French, you can learn French!” Then the opening sequence finished and a voice announced the title of the episode. My daughter’s eyes opened wide and she exclaimed: “It’s in German!” Well, […]

After reading a book in which the protagonist interviews various people (with sometimes outlandish questions!) for her school newspaper, and a first experiment of Interviewing Mommy, here is finally the long-awaited, hilarious Interview with Grandma This interview is already two months old, it was made only a few days after our then not-quite-5-year-old girl interviewed […]

I am very much looking forward to our visit with Grandma, because she hasn’t seen my now 5-year-old daughter in a while (3 months, that is). I’d like her to tell me if my impression is right that my daughter’s German skills have improved quite a bit recently. Just tonight, as I came home after […]

Do you know the German prefix “über”? It means “over” and is used in such verbs as überholen (overtake), überhören (overhear), übersehen (overlook), überschreiben (overwrite) – you get the idea. However, it is also used to designate the day after tomorrow. Tomorrow is morgen, the day after tomorrow is übermorgen, and the day after the […]

We’ve been reading a book where the protagonist interviews various people for her school newspaper. That gave my daughter the idea to interview me. And what better way to record her vocabulary and sentence structure? And her imagination, of course! Enjoy “Interview with Mommy” in three parts (and in German, our minority language): interview part […]

Two weeks ago, on Easter weekend, my family accompanied me to Amsterdam, where I attended a conference. They spent the weekend with the family of another attendee, whose daughter is two years older than mine. They live in Germany, but her mother is English. The two girls had a great time, chatting away in German […]