One year old suddenly began to attend bilingual kindergarten! She was the youngest in the class

Today's article casually talks to you about ran ran's recent kindergarten situation, which are some of my small feelings in life.

It's been almost a month since I started kindergarten. The kindergarten she reported this time was a new kindergarten and was bilingual in German and English.

We weren't satisfied with the kindergarten we used to go to, so this time we reported a family that was far away from home. The leisurely kindergarten can be reached in 7 minutes on foot, this time it takes 7 minutes by car to get there, which is already far away in Germany...

The new kindergarten is quite large and is expected to enroll 6 classes with more than 100 people. However, because not enough teachers have been recruited, there are only two classes, a small class of 10 people aged 0-3 years, and a 2-6 year old class of 20 people.

It is said that some teachers will not be hired until August, so when the kindergarten starts in the autumn in August, the kindergarten can open two more classes. As for the remaining two classes, they will not be open until a teacher is recruited.

Breakfast at the kindergarten

In recent years, the demand for childcare in Germany has been rising rapidly, many mothers want to go out to work, and every kindergarten has a long waiting list. However, although Germany has been vigorously building kindergartens, it still faces the problem of an extreme shortage of kindergarten teachers.

The house is easy to build, but the expansion of the teacher team takes many years.

Because this kindergarten is a Bilingual Kindergarten in German and English, the style is very different from the kindergarten that Yo-Yo used to attend, and it feels very international.

There were two English speakers in the teacher's ranks, an Englishman and a Dutchman, both of whom settled in Germany and could also speak German.

But the philosophy of our bilingual kindergarten is that English-speaking teachers must always speak English, not switch languages in front of children, and let children adapt to the environment of one person corresponding to one language.

So English teachers must use English even when communicating with German teachers. This surprised me to find that even the German teachers in the kindergarten were very good in English, and they could switch between English and German at will, and they didn't mind communicating with parents in English at all!

Kindergarten live shooting

I have lived in Germany for 8 years, in order to integrate into Germany and make German friends, I have always attached great importance to learning German, and I have tried to communicate with Germans in German as much as possible in my life, and I have become accustomed to it for so many years, and there are fewer opportunities to use English.

Whether it was in a leisurely kindergarten or school, I never met a German who was willing to communicate with me in English, I don't know if they thought I had good German or because I was shy to speak English... Or maybe some people aren't as fluent in English.

The kindergarten is a completely different story, and the parents of this kindergarten are mostly foreigners! Got me another chance to speak English!

However, he is the youngest in the class, and most of the children are between the ages of 2 and 3.

H's parents, who were only a month older than Ranran, came to Germany in the same year as me, and my father was an IT engineer and my mother was an automotive engineer. They said they were more comfortable communicating in English than in German.

Two-year-old K's parents are Tunisian, his father has immigrated to Germany for 20 years, he is fluent in German and English, and his mother has been in Germany for 7 years, hardly speaks German, and communicates with parents and teachers completely in English.

There is also a 2-and-a-half-year-old M, whose father is German and whose mother is a Russian who immigrated to Germany at the age of 13. This mom can switch freely between German, Russian, English and French!

2 and a half years old A, the mother is German, the father is Portuguese, the little girl looks like a southern European, very beautiful. Marx actually said that A and Ranran looked quite similar...

Although both parents grew up in Germany and are fluent in German, they are also the second generation of immigrants, and their ancestors come from Turkey, North Africa and other countries.

There are very few real parents in this kindergarten who are white Germans! But this is not unusual, because the proportion of immigrants in Germany's big cities is already quite high, and cologne, where I am located, has the highest proportion of immigrants in Germany.

Germany has always had a tradition of accepting refugees, and they did not accept refugees since the war in Syria. Historically, Germany has received a large number of refugees and immigrants from Vietnam (Vietnam War), Russia and Eastern Europe (the collapse of the Soviet Union), and Africa, and has also imported a large number of Workers from Turkey and Nurses from Asia after World War II.

So it's not uncommon to have an immigrant background in Germany, and everyone is used to it.

The most talked about by kindergarten parents who have just met is the problem of their children's language enlightenment. Many children grow up in multilingual families, with dads speaking a language, moms speaking a language, and learning German and English in kindergarten.

However, the consensus of parents and teachers is that learning more languages is good for children, and parents should use their own advantages to insist on speaking their mother tongue to their children.

So in Ranran Kindergarten, parents often speak all kinds of languages to their children that I don't understand. When communicating with teachers and parents, switch to German or English.

The 14-month-old H's native speaker is Polish and doesn't understand German at all. But it just so happens that there is a teacher in the class who is Polish and speaks Polish, and she sometimes speaks Polish with H...

I spoke to Ran ran in kindergarten Chinese nothing special, everyone here is confidently speaking their native language, but they can switch to a language that others can understand at any time.

The playground section outside is not yet fully completed

In Germany, children who have just entered kindergarten have an adaptation period, usually one month. Parents must accompany their children in kindergarten during the adaptation period.

For the first week, I spent two hours a day in kindergarten, and I and the other mothers were watching the children play, chatting and getting to know each other.

The next week, the teacher asked us to gradually leave the classroom and try to separate. The time of separation is gradual, 15 minutes on the first day, half an hour on the second day, then 1 hour, 2 hours...

By the end of the second week, she was able to spend two hours alone in kindergarten, and she never cried when she was separated, and it seemed that she had developed enough trust in her teacher.

However, the teacher said that most of the time she had to hold her, because she was the youngest baby in the class, and the three teachers always took turns to hold her... I feel sorry for the teacher's waist!

When trying to separate, we parents wait in the kindergarten reading room, and if the child is crying, the teacher will always notify us to pick up the child.

There was tea and coffee in the reading room, and the waiting time for the parents to meet each other and exchange phone numbers was the golden time.

Exercise room in the kindergarten

In addition to talking about language enlightenment, the most talked about is how difficult it is to get a kindergarten position in Germany! And how lucky we were to get the kindergarten position!

Many people are wondering, how did I apply for a kindergarten position for Ranran? Many people can't queue up for years!

After talking to my moms, I found a little bit of regularity!

Let's start with the situation in my family.

I have written before that the number of places in the 0-3 year old class of kindergartens in Germany is very tight, and the chances of success in applying for a new kindergarten are even greater, because the new kindergarten is at least one whole class of children at a time.

The old kindergarten has very few vacancies every year, and the old kindergarten will give priority to the brothers and sisters of the kindergarten children, and the new quota actually released to the society may be two or three a year, which is very difficult to apply.

In the past, it was a new kindergarten, and this time when we signed up for Ranran, we also set our sights on the new kindergarten.

Then this is very critical, you must know before others where to build a new kindergarten, in order to have a higher success rate.

My family, Marx, was well-informed and familiar with his surroundings. Before he was even born, he found a place he often drove by, "as if" he was building a kindergarten.

At that time, there was not even a prototype of the kindergarten, just a construction site, and it was not visible from the outside that it was a kindergarten. But Marx's intuition was very accurate, he called the city hall to inquire, did not expect to get a reply that there is indeed a kindergarten, but also told us that it is a bilingual kindergarten!

Ideally, what I would like to report to Ranran the most is Froebel Kindergarten. But after looking up the background of this kindergarten, I changed my mind.

This bilingual kindergarten brand (educare) has a very good reputation, has been rated as the most popular employer in Germany for 5 years, and is a signed cooperative brand for employee kindergartens in international large enterprises such as Mercedes-Benz and Audi.

So I immediately decided to abandon Froebel Kindergarten and apply for this bilingual kindergarten.

But it was still too early to sign up. As soon as we were born, we called the city hall again to inquire about the registration, and the city hall said that the kindergarten has not yet been built, and the online registration system has not been opened, but you can already leave your name on the waiting list and notify you after the registration system is online.

So we're on the waiting list. When we were half a year old, the director called to inform us that the online registration system was open and that we could register. So we were able to get a nursery spot easily.

I talked to four moms, all of whom said they had applied for the position because they had called Jugendamt (Juvenile Protection Bureau) and the Jugendamt staff had told them in advance about the new kindergarten.

In fact, before the new kindergarten opened the online registration system, there were already more than 100 people on the waiting list, and it was already full as soon as the first day was opened... If you waited until it went live, it would be too late...

How can I know the news in advance? In addition to the familiarity of locals like Marx, the practice of our four foreign mothers in kindergarten is also worth thinking about

They all called Jugendamt for help in a "desperate" situation, some said that their children would have to quit their jobs if they did not go to kindergarten; some said that they did not have family and friends to help with their children in Germany, and their husbands often traveled the world on business, and they would be exhausted with two babies alone...

Jugendamt staff generally try to help, and it is Jugendamt who tells them the news of the new kindergarten in advance, which allows them to enter the waiting list before the registration system goes live.

However, the kindergartens enroll more foreign immigrants than the Germans, I don't know if it is because the director thinks that foreigners need the position of the kindergarten more than the Germans? I feel that the admissions are more inclined to foreigners, or maybe its international teaching philosophy makes it more inclined to foreigners?

The Polish mom said that when she told the German mom next to her that her 1-year-old son was going to kindergarten, they were surprised and asked, "How did you apply?" She didn't dare to speak up

In short, there must be no need to worry about discrimination, German kindergartens do not give Preferential treatment to Germans when they are admitted.

Author: Yo-Yo Mom, studying in the Netherlands to meet love, studying in Saudi Arabia to feel the exotic style, working in Ireland alone through pregnancy, raising two mixed-race female dolls in Germany, sister "Yo-Yo" 7 years old, sister "Ranran" 10 months, Father Marx is a German sociologist with a delicate appearance and a delicate heart. Share the interesting life and cultural collision of Chinese and Western families, and gain insight into German education. His masterpiece "Learning Parenting with German Mothers".