Licht in Lich

I've encountered some pretty fearsome creatures in the past few days!

These are some of the 8-9 year olds in my VBS group at the English Camp the church in Lich is running. Joel and Tatijana roped me in as a helper since the staff were short native-english speakers. Every morning I catch a 7:10am bus to the 7:35 train from Marburg to Giessen, then the 8:11 train from Giessen to Lich, then once in Lich I walk to the church and get there pretty much at 8:30am sharp. Day one gave me MBTA flasbacks...
Our group is called the White Horses - our Native American name since the camp theme this week is Native Americans. We spend 3 and half hours together in the mornings practicing simple vocabulary and sentences. The sentences pretty much confuse them, and one little guy gets in panic mode if we ever ask him to answer a question in English, but if you get down on their level and whip out your German and speak a mix of the two languages they lighten up a lot. We have 9 kids and 3 leaders for our group. Sounds like a lot, but there's Kate, who doesn't know much German, but is a native English speaker from the US, Anke, who is a German with great English, and me - who is a native English speaker with decent German. We each have varying degrees of experience working with kids, so if you put us together we do a good job.
Yesterday one little girl was fascinated with the fact that I could speak English so well and could also communicate to her in German. She wanted to know if it was hard for me to learn German. I explained that I only use the article "the" in English and German has "der", "die", and "das" AND they change depending on how you use them in a sentence. She had honestly never thought of that and said something to the degree of "huh, wow, yeah, that would be really hard to memorize!" I wanted to say "yeah, understatement of the year!"

I've had to use my German a lot to try to explain things to our group since they literally haven't had a lot of experience with English yet in school. This has been a great environment for me to practice my German b/c these kids appreciate that I can help them while at the same time noticing that yes, it's hard for me to speak their language just like it's hard for them to learn mine. It helps both groups build their language confidence. It's also good to be talking with the German helpers all in German. They didn't know me in my pre-confident-and-able-to-dialogue-auf-Deutsch days, so they only speak to me in German, which makes me speak German back. Yay!