Well being a Betreuerin (camp counselor) and LKT Lehrerin (high school credit teacher) was AWESOME. I was really nervous going into it all, since I'd never been to summer camp as a kid, and had no idea what to expect. At first it was really hard to get in with the other Betreuer because most of them have known each other for years, and even if it was their first summer on staff they'd been to Waldsee as kids. It was also weird having another name, my camp name is Ines, and it took awhile to sink in, but now that I'm back I sort of miss being Ines. Once I got into the swing of things more I started making friends. I really love working up there in the woods, speaking German all day, teaching kids a new language, and having fun with my co-workers. I want to go back next summer!
There are so many stories from the past 7 weeks I could never retell half of them here, and some of them are just for Waldsee, because I'm pretty sure they don't make sense outside of camp. I'll stick with the story of my career as a German rapper. Every night at camp we have an Abendprogramm, it's usually a game or activity for the kids to do and have fun with while speaking and learning German. One Sunday night, while living with the 4 week high school credit students, we had a Grand Prix der Lieder. Every house picked a camp song, and a musical style. Our song was Eisbär (polar bears), which is a song about a German hockey team, and our style was rap. We had a half hour to go home and figure out how we were going to do it, and get costumes. It really wasn't too hard to "remix" the song, and we all had our own parts, and our baggy pants, hats & sunglasses made us look pretty hard core ;). I was the MC (sort of) I got the song started, and ended it. While planning it all the girls were pretty surprised with my rap abilities (I was too), and after we were done performing we got a good response from the other groups. It was so much fun, and also pretty damn hilarious (especially when I lost my hat about 1/2 way through the performance). I'll post the video here later, at the moment it's not on my computer.
My class was also a lot of fun, I had the German 1 and 2 group, and it's really amazing all that we accomplished in 4 weeks. My students named the class the Eisbärvögel (polar bear birds), and Albert, who's a really amazing artist, drew our class emblem (see the photo above, with my lovely students). The first week and a half we did a lot with basic functional language and grammar, then we moved on to reading German children's books (then they wrote their own), and our last unit was current events around the world. I think that was their favorite unit, they loved watching a daily German news program and reading the articles together. They read daily headlines to the camp after dinner, and in the end we made our own Waldsee news program.
I also lead an Arbeitsgruppe in the last two weeks, it's basically an elective class that meets once (or more as needed) a day. My class was a project based on Hundertwasser architecture (my favorite architect ever! see pictures above), I had 5 students, and when we met outside of our usual time we had quite a few other LKTs helping us as well. Our camp dean told me that we could remodel Baden-Baden, our outdoor shower house which was not too visually appealing. We went to town coming up with about 50 different projects and plans for fixing it up. In the end we only had time to repaint the outside, rip out an interior wall, finish the inside walls, paint them & put in two support posts. I'm really proud of my students, we got a lot done, and had so much fun too!
So that was my summer! Now to get everything packed for my move to Austria!
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