Austrian Au Pair Franziska S., based in Susan Grubstein’s Brooklyn cluster, describes her experience of sharing her culture with the Special Music School students:
As a trained kindergarten and after school care teacher, I was pretty excited to work with a group of kids again. I visited the 3rd grade in the Special Music School in NYC where one of my host kids goes to. I didn’t know what to expect and thought I would be nervous, but as soon as fifteen 8 year olds came in, I just enjoyed telling them about my home country Austria.
I was so excited that they were so interested in learning about another culture.
First I showed them a presentation where I told them a bit about Austria and also about me. The kids started to warm up as soon as I involved them and asked some multiple choice questions and they could make some comments. I was surprised that those young kids knew that much about my little home country.
After around 20 minutes, I handed out the Travel Journals and they were able to fill out a lot by themselves. Afterwards we compared it and corrected the information in it all together. In the end I handed them out the vocabulary sheet for the German numbers and they did great.
The counting was the absolute highlight for me. Because when I was done, they told me in which other languages they can count until 10. I heard kids counting in Spanish, French, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, … I was so impressed!
I’m glad to know that the kids really enjoyed having me there as their „guest speaker“.
I’ll never forget this experience.