field trip

Yesterday was field trip day with two grade 6 classes. Besides the fact that I had to get up at 5:30am for this, it was a really fun day. :) I had forgotten how much fun field trips were. lol. We took this AWESOME brand new double decker bus to Dresden with 48 restless, excited, pre-pubescent children and one of the privileges of being a supervisor/teacher is that you get to pick the best seats in the bus. Heck, you can kick kids out of their spots with ridiculous rules like "teachers are supposed to sit in front". So my mentor teacher, Rita, and I got the seats right at the front on the "top floor" lol. That means we just had a giant windshield in front of us and we could see for miles from up there. Neato. (That is such a grand word.)





Anyways, once we got to Dresden we dropped off the other grade 6 class at the Hygienemuseum (yes, a museum dedicated to passing on the knowledge, discovery, and importance of human hygiene...actually a lot more interesting than it sounds. Especially the room about sexuality. I mean, IT SHOWED EVERYTHING...INCLUDING VIDEOS...AND IT HAD GAMES...NOW IMAGINE TRYING TO KEEP 25 ELEVEN YEARS OLDS FROM UNCONTROLLABLY GIGGLING THEIR BUTTS OFF IN THERE...). Anyways, we dropped the first class off while we did a guided bus tour of Dresden. Then we walked around the inner city a bit, which would have been more fun if it had been a little warmer. But I was just loving getting to know some of the students better. I mean, in class it's not really possible, plus I'm not with them very often. Anyways, as of yesterday those girls offically worship the very ground I walk on. Apparently I'm the coolest, most fashionable thing since sliced bread. And I somehow got roped into giving them all makeovers on the 3 day class-trip in May. Ok, so I offered, but they're all so darn cute and they love me. Yes yes, I'm a total pushover and suffer from a need-everyone-everywhere-to-like-me complex. Tell me something I DON'T know.


Anyways, so after our Dresden tour it was our turn at the Hygienemuseum. It's actually pretty cool, cuz they have an entire program for the school classes that come to visit. The class is divided up into 7 groups and each group is responsible for one of the 7 rooms in the museum. Let me see which rooms I can remember: Food drink and healthy nutrition, sexuality, beauty hair and skin, physical movement, knowledge and thinking, the life cycle, and I can't remember the last one. The overall theme was "Wohl fuehlen in meiner Haut" which basically means "Feeling good (or comfortable) in my own skin". Anyways, each group got a little "toolbelt" with different objects to help them figure stuff out and they all had a booklet with questions to help them make the most of their experience. After about an hour and a half we were all rounded up into a seminar room where our museum group leader summed things up and then asked each group to give a short presentation on their room. It was very organized and interesting. Much better than just taking a giant school class on a random museum walk-through where none of them pay attention anyway. This way they actually intentionally learn and discover things with minimal distraction and goofing off. I had an absolute blast just walking from room to room and helping the groups, trying out the different experiments and machines. Really got to know some of the kids better. Very cool museum, too. We didn't even have nearly enough time to really get a good overview of the whole place. I'm not the kind of person to spend hours in one museum, but this one totally rocked. I mean, I learned how to waltz, how many newtons or whatever my legs are capable of lifting, what it feels like to be old, what it looks like when a baby is born (another disgusting video), and ... well, we'll just leave the sexuality room in my memory. Ew. That should suffice.





And then it was 6pm and we were back in Eilenburg. Long field trip, hey? 7:30am-6pm. Needless to say I went home, ate a large amount of Hawaiian toast, and watched that Gilbert Grape movie on TV. Then. Bed.





Oh, one last thing. we could take pictures of random body parts (well, like, hairs and scars and beauty marks etc.) under this microscope and email them to ourselves. This is my hair.

Cool, hey? Ok, not for you, but for me it was...