Mehr Ideen!

This post is a continuation of my "ode to blogs"...an expression of gratitude for all of the great ideas out there and how we've found them useful at our house.

As you see from the blog post title, this has to to with German. As a lover of the German culture, people and language, I would love for our children to at least feel comfortable with the language. Thankfully, there is a great blog: http://www.alphabet-garten.com/wordpress/, as well as the Alphabet Garten online store: http://www.alphabet-garten.com/. From this website we have a growing collection of German children's books and DVDs. These sites combined have provided many ideas for learning German at home.

Here is the latest example of what we've done to learn German at the Savage house (and I have to say, this is not the norm...I am most excited about it, though!)...

First, at the end of Phoebe's reading time (which we've started doing for 20 minutes each morning after Joanna goes down for her nap), we've begun reading a German book together. This provides a great time for me to speak to Phoebe in German and ask her questions about the book, which she can sometimes answer. This particular day, we read this beautiful picture book (translated, "I am the little cat"):



We then listened to and sang a traditional German song about a cat (die Katze), called "ABC, die Katze lief im Schnee" (translated: ABC, the cat went running in the snow). This book and CD is one of our favorites. It was given to Phoebe when she was born by our dear German friend, Elfy:

At a German kids' website (http://www.kidsweb.de/winter/abc_die_katze/abc_katze_basteln.html), I found a craft that went with the song, that Phoebe and I made...

And then, since once of Phoebe's favorite stuffed animals is "Kitty", we took her for a run in the snow...

I had to add this picture...the alphabet print-out for the craft includes the letters with the "dots", called "umlauts"...so cool!

And, back to the topic of blogs, I've seen on the Mommy blogs I mentioned in the past posts that this is a common idea...taking a book and creating all kinds of activities around it. Thankful for these ideas to inspire me!