OUR TOP GERMAN SCHOOL CULTURE SHOCKS 🇩🇪 It's Surprisingly Different Here vs. in the USA!

Our four American kids have gone through a year and a half in German public schools, and now we are sharing our top school culture shocks! There are quite a few differences, many of which we didn't expect before arriving. Things like how lunch is done, teaching methods, school supplies, desks and lockers, and more!

#germany #germanylifestyle #germanschool #americansingermany #cultureshock

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//CHAPTERS - SKIP TO THE PART YOU WANT//
0:00 - Intro, who we are
02:23 - 1 - School Supplies
04:39 - 2 - Emphasis on Neatness
05:56 - 3 - School Buses USA vs Germany
07:30 - 4 - Learning the Complicated German School System
10:04 - 5 - Kindergarten is Much Different in Germany vs. USA
12:03 - 6 - Emphasis on Engineering and Math
13:25 - 7 - Different Teaching Methods
14:37 - 8 - Lunch Time is Much Different!
16:54 - 9 - Book Storage is Much Different
18:37 - 10 - The whole transition was INTIMIDATING and Challenging

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//ABOUT US//
We are a family of six, with four kids and a cat 😹, who moved from the USA to Germany in February of 2021 to pursue our dreams of adventure, travel, learning another language, and integrating into German life. We hope you enjoy our videos about our journey to integrate - the highs and the lows of being foreigners on the adventure of a lifetime.

//LET'S CONNECT!//

[LisaMaierLiest]

Probably as a hint for other immigrants:
If you have trouble doing the school supply list - go to a smaller shop that specialices on school and office supplies. Hand them the list and ask them, if they could help you - they will collect everything correctly in a short time for you. (You will save a lot of time and you won't buy anything wrong.)

[jhdix]

Considering that in Germany most test question in later years will be free text answers instead of multiple choice, that emphasis on neat handwriting makes sense. I guess it's normal that handwriting skills deteriorate over time, so the idea is: The neater the handwriting is in the first years, the better the chance for a teacher to be able to decipher any answer given by a student in the Abiturprüfung.

[scloulou]

I‘m an elementary school teacher especially for migrants and children with another mother tongue and it was so helpful to watch your video and learn about the occuring difficulties with getting used to the system. It surely will help me to understand and help with problems easier. Thank you so much! ♥️

[dude]

You can always switch school in both ways, my brother went from Gymnasium to Realschule to Hauptschule and has now a Bachelor's degree. I did my Abitur but didn't go to college right afterwards and took an Ausbildung instead.
There are many different ways to get an education and a job in Germany, no need to worry in case one of the children can't get their Abitur.

[cobba]

The drawback of leaving books in school is that those books will contain the explanations or other knowledge the kids might need for their homework.
Having to access random web sites for that is counter productive. Or having to have the parents explain something that can be easily looked up.
And if the kids really do need help, it allows the parents to brush up on what the kids need to know in that specific instance.

Also, it teaches some planning - to prepare for the next day: look up which classes they have and pack only what is needed, as well as not forget anything. A concept we call "Mitdenken".

[bibliopolist]

Erzieherinnen (kindergarten teachers) are not necessarily less qualified than teachers, but they do have a different qualification.

[SciDOCMBC]

Schools in Germany have been open again for a long time. That what you mean is the summer holidays. They start at different times in the different federal states so that the German highways are not completely blocked. when everyone goes on vacation at the same time.

[katjahuskinson]

We actually do have dedicated school buses in Germany too. But only when there's no or next to no public transportation going between the school and the home 😉. And of course those buses aren't neccesarily yellow and they're usually just contracted "Busunternehmen" and those buses are usually used for travels (Reisebusse), but also not always 😅

[dschoas]

One big side effect of the colouring is the training of the motoric skills. It also relaxes the pupils as a different section of the brain is used for it.

[outwardbound]

@My Merry Messy Life it might be something you mention next time, but Schulranzen/bookbags, especially for elementary school are extremely different and so is the process of buying them. Because children walk to school and have to carry a lot, their bookbags have to be ergonomic and fitting to their hight/weight/body type. Families usually go to specialized shops and have like an appointment where the child tries on different brands and models to find the right bag for their back before choosing the color and pattern. These bags are incredibly expensive and therefore are usually worn throughout all four years of elementary school. They have a ton of extra features too like rain covers and reflectors that come in handy for children walking in the rain and dark

[mareikejoeben]

What I especially like about you guys is your personal attitude towards all these crazy and sometimes hard to understand and follow situations. You seem to take it easy and just cope with the situation. And you ALWAYS can still laugh about yourself, which is really great and makes you very sympathatic. I very much like that about you. I am a very similar person.

[mapau]

The two of you really deserve an official German medal for figuring out the German school system after only four month in Germany, considering all that overwhelming adaption stress of transferring a whole family into a new culture at the speed of light- aaand on top of that for successfully placing your two oldest boys in a Gymnasium!!! 👍😀GOLD MEDAL! GOLD MEDAL!🥇🥇

[thorstenunger]

In concerns of "Sprechstunde" : This means a meeting face to face discussing / informing about certain matters. A Arzt-Sprechstunde means the opening times to see a doctor, a Lehrer- Sprechstunde means an informative meeting between teacher and parent. In contrast a Sprach-Stunde ("a" instead of "e") just means an hour of language-classes, a Mathe-Stunde refers to maths lessons etc.

[ag]

basically what you taught me here is that the school system in southern germany is a lot different from the school system in the north and east, because even when I went to school 20 years ago we had a school cafeteria where we would have lunch and we also had a locker where we left all our books etc..

[krzysztofp.]

Remembering my son coloring a clown in first year English class (3rd grade Grundschule): you could choose the color for each part of the clown by yourself, but had to name the color; he just filled everything up with a Bleistift and wrote GREY😀 love your videos!

[verenak]

My elementary school made the lack of lockers a learning experience in organisation. We had some expert come in who weighted our backpacks and we all had to clean out our backpacks and look for unneccessary things. Learned how to adjust the lenght of our backpack according to our height.

[vonsweety]

The German school system is very hard to understand even for German people. You are not alone in this. With the first child in school it is for every parent mindblowing. But on the other hand... if a child doesn´t make it into the gymnasium directly after the 4. grade it is not such a disaster, there are a lot of ways around to make it into university. It is probably one of the great economical advantages of the german system that a child can get a very good formal education. And maybe afterwards go to an university. For example, a child that is not performing perfectly in school in the 10. grade (because the child has a lot of much more important things to do than care for school ;)) could get an enducation at a nurse and go afterwards to university to become a doctor, without ever going to a gymnasium. It is a longer and much harder way, but some childen just can´t focus at the age of 16 on school and they get there second chance when they are a bit older and more mature. Many of those children do much better in university than the children that go directly from school to university, because they are simply more mature.

[kerstinklenovsky]

Well done to you guys for battling through our German school/kindergarten bureaucracy jungle and coming out successfully the other end. 👍
I am a teacher myself and I help refugee children with exactly those things, and I can only say that the task often seems overwhelmingly complicated, even for us who have been through the German school system ourselves.
You deserve a medal. ❤🤩❤

[fuchsadler]

At my Grundschule they didn't have Spinds but they had a shelf in the class room where you could store your school books if you didn't have homework in that subject on that specific day, so you didn't have to carry all of it around

[Roger-npwi]

Hello dear family and thank you for another interesting Sunday video.
Handwriting is enormously important. This motoric and cognitive process helps us to remember better what we have written. In addition, it obviously helps with spelling and it also seems to have positive effects on the ability to compose texts.