Teaching kindergartners online — in German!

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced schools to close and students to isolate at home, teachers at all levels of instruction faced sudden and significant challenges in how to adapt.

But consider teaching kindergartners entirely in German to those too young to answer back in German very much and whose parents don’t speak the language and can’t help with home schooling?

This is the dilemma in which Emily Heck ’05 found herself. She is a K4 teacher at the Milwaukee German Immersion School, the only public, German immersion program in the country.

When Milwaukee Public Schools were closed and all classes went to online learning, her instruction changed to twiceweekly Zoom meetings for the 4-year-olds to greet each other, sing songs and do some show and tell with as much German as they could muster.

Other strategies included creating online folders with unit information sent to parents each week and videos in German for the students to learn new vocabulary and do vocabulary review. “I have sung songs, done read-alouds, and put books into PowerPoint to read over them and create videos so kids can watch the videos at home over and over again if they wish.”

On top of this, she managed the school’s social media page (facebook.com/mpsmgis), collected and posted information for parents, came up with virtual spirit days and created videos for the greater school-wide community.

This was Heck’s 14th year of teaching. “Teaching kindergarten is generally fun, but teaching in the time of COVID-19 has made it stressful and fun at the same time!” she says.