All About the Kids - Assemblies and Early Halloween

Today (Thursday) I dropped off the kids at school dressed up for a Halloween celebration. From what we hear there is not any trick or treating in Germany on October 31st so the school does a few things to celebrate. Next week is the mid-term break and there is no school, plus November 1st is a holiday. For this reason the Halloween celebration was this week. The school allows the students to come to school in their costume. Later this afternoon they have a parade of all of the costume participants and they do a modified trick or treat called trunk or treat. Some volunteer parents decorate the trunk of their cars and pass out candy and cookies that the school has provided. David and Katherine took a bag full of candy to hand out to their friends in class too.

David is obviously the yellow Angry Bird. He has two big pillows strapped on under his costume and he still looks too skinny to fill out the costume. We had to order it last minute from a costume shop online. It arrived super fast. We placed the order at 18:00 on Monday night and it arrived by 8:00 the next morning. He put everything on in the cafeteria before school and headed to class. He got several compliments that I heard as he was walking away.

Katherine is wearing a fancy dress that Cindy found for her a few months ago. Last week after school Katherine asked if she could play dress up in it. She has been putting it on almost every day since then and she was thrilled to get to wear it as her costume today. She said that she is dressed up as a princess that "has not yet been invented, and may not ever be invented". Leah is the girl next to her above. She is a new friend that is in Katherine's class.

Late last week Katherine's class performed a show in front of the entire Primary School, including her 5th grade brother. Her part was one of two narrators for the 13 Little Piggies show. She had a lot of lines and she worked really hard to get to know them. In the video she is reading the lines from a note card, but trust us, she had them memorized. The part that she messes up on at the end we blame on a late script change. The teachers had to change up the last few lines for logistic reasons to make the show flow into the next agenda items. The morning of the show we talked to Katherine about how the show must go on. As you will see, it did not sink in that well. She eventually got back on track and did a great job overall. Cindy and I both thought this was a pretty big deal to get five year old kids to perform in front of an audience this large and have this many lines.

This is a long video so for anyone in a hurry here are some of the Katherine highlight times. Katherine is at the beginning zoomed in singing the opening group song, then at :40 seconds she does most of her lines, later again at 8:45 before the video section, 9:48 in the video and towards the end at 11:43. You might check out 3:56 too for a funny moment.

After Katherine's class performed we were treated to another unexpected performance that I enjoyed. Below is an excerpt from the BIS Director's blog about the group that we saw perform.

During the course of this past week BIS has been hosting a visit by 46 students from Tauranga Intermediate in New Zealand. This school is New Zealand’s largest primary school with 1200 students and specialises in having only Grade 6 and 7 classes (in New Zealand these grade levels are part of the primary school system). These visiting students had spent the past year fundraising for this trip. For the vast majority of the them it is the first time that they have been overseas. They have an amazing schedule lined up because not only are they seeing the sights of Bavaria, but they will also be travelling to Austria, the Netherlands and then Oman before returning home. 
Last week the students gave a rousing Kapa Haka performance for primary and secondary school students. Kapa Haka is a celebration of songs, dance and the famous Haka (a war dance done by warriors before battle). They also played rugby against our Under 14 side and narrowly defeated us; and played softball against our girls team, again narrowly defeating us in a keenly fought contest.

Again back to the whole culture experience that our kids are getting over here. Who knew they would get exposure to cultural song and dance from New Zealand? This was an intense show. I was not planning on recording it, but decided to a few minutes in. The big guy playing the guitar walked out on stage and started talking in a language that I did not recognize. He was speaking Te Reo Māori which is the language of the Māori. They are the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand. Again, who knew? He was a very loud and intense individual who kept speaking for a couple of minutes and nobody understood him. Finally he broke in to English and explained what he had been talking about previously. I have loaded another video for everyone to see the performance. It is also pretty long but worth it if you have the time. The first song is pretty calm and gives off the island vibe. Check out the middle Haka war dance too. Some of the younger kids on the front rows were running to their teachers and a few were crying. Check it out.

This group has been here for more than a week. This morning it looked like they had suitcases packed and headed out to the next place. From the Director's blog he indicated that families of BIS students had been housing the visitors during their stay. The performance was running long and actually ran past the time that school was supposed to be dismissed. They cut the last performance due to the time constraints, but we got the idea.

I doubt that we will be posting much over the next week. We will be taking advantage of the mid term break and doing a little traveling. I am sure that we will have many new pictures and stories to tell once we return.