Induction Course in Maria in der Aue

So after a non-stop tour of Cologne, I met the future Language assistants in three Bundesländer (roughly equivalent to counties in England but with a lot more independence and power), at Cologne Hauptbahnhof (station) ready to depart on our three day intensive training course. 

The first hurdle was discovering which group of randomly accumulating people was the right one as Cologne station is a busy one! Eventually we all found each other and headed to the buses for the hour long transfer to Maria in der Aue. Now we were pretty much all expecting this to be some kind of hostel where we would be staying for two nights, somewhere functional for the amount of people but we were pleasantly surprised to pull up to a hotel which offered en suite rooms based on two people sharing and there was even free wifi! 

Maria in der Aue

Chocolate mousse!

The location was amazing and having been paired up in our rooms according to who we were living closest to in Germany we started to get more of an idea about what this year would entail. The first day was a lot of absorption of information before we were tasked with planning a lesson ready to teach the following day. We'd been split into Ländergruppen and then divided into smaller groups of three or four in order to plan and teach a lesson where each member of the group had their own 10/15 minute slot. Each group within the larger group was assigned a teaching level to aim the lesson at ranging from total beginners to the top level in a secondary school. The final day was then basically a school day where each small group had to teach their 45 minute lesson to the rest of the group and receive feedback on their planning, technique and content. My group as aiming at 8-11 year olds so we looked at the Robin Hood myth and played around with vocab, story telling and songs which surrounded the legend. The planning was more work than we thought and actually standing up and teaching taught us a lot about how the classroom actually works both from the perspective of the students and the teacher! 

The view from the back of the hotel in the morning and evening