Hooray! We have a school!

Since children in Erlangen, Germany were still on holiday (vacation) when we began school on August 25th, it took every ounce of patience on my second graders' part to wait to make our initial contact with a teacher in Germany. We finally recived an introductory e-mail on September 27th from Ms. Billmann. She explained that she was a student teacher and that she had a group of 7 and 8 year olds to whom she taught art and a group of 9 and 10 year olds who were learning English. Because we had celebrated Constitution Day the day before, we introduced ourselves to Ms. Billmann and her art class by sending them a photo of our entire class holding up the first three words of the Preamble to the Constitution. We explained that we had dissected the preamble and learned what all those big words meant and why the preamble was an important part of the Constitution. We also told her class that we learned the preamble very quickly when it was put to music. After practicing it for only two days, we sang the preamble for the entire school over the intercom on Constitution Day. Music can certainly help us remember big, boring words that otherwise might not make any sense.