Across the span of 2023, both our senior and junior Deutsch students have been involved in plenty of exciting events and competitions.

From December 2022 to January 2023, Miguel Morales participated in a Deutsch exchange program to Bayern with Frau Currie as Group Leader. Franzi, his exchange partner from Bayern, came to Burnside to stay with Miguel during February and March this year.

Josh Packman is currently part of a two-month German exchange in Bayern as well, with his exchange partner Colin Roos coming to stay in 2024.

Two of our Year 12 students have won the German PASCH scholarship: Haasini Mantena and Skye Paton. For two weeks, they attended a German language course in Bremen at the Goethe-Institute. They took classes auf Deutsch in the mornings, and had excursions in the afternoons and evenings to see the city.

Our junior students have not been missing out. The Goethe-Institut helped arrange several entertaining workshops at our school. We had German rapper Anjay visit with all his professional music gear and perform his songs for us, as well as a lively session in the gyms where we learnt how to play Handball, a classic game at Deutsch schools.

During Open Night, several of our students have volunteered to showcase our Deutsch course to the Year 8 students from various schools who will be joining us here at Burnside in 2024. Our volunteers had a lot of fun playing games with the visitors, and fighting over what German songs to listen to on Frau Currie’s computer.

At the start of term two, our juniors got to make fabric bags (Stofftaschen) with cool German words or sayings for ourselves and write a letter in Deutsch to Glendowie College in Auckland. We got our letters back at the end of term four along with bags they decorated for us. We think it is fascinating to be able to get connected by German, with new people.

For the first half of the year, we were very lucky to have German Languages Assistant Greta Lassen join us from Germany. She always made our lessons more interesting with her knowledge of the culture. One lesson, she surprised us with Marmorkuchen, marble cake, and taught its recipe to us auf Deutsch. In Term Four, she returned and hosted Langcraft, where we made friendship bracelets with our favourite German words on it. It was a pleasure having her here with us.

In September, two teams of our Year 10 students participated in the OSKAR-Quiz. The quiz included questions about Deutsch general knowledge, language, and some fun challenges to do with German culture like the Trabi race. We ended up with the OSKAR trophy for first place and a Mini-OSKAR for second place. Herzlichen Glückwunsch!

Overall, this has been a very fulfilling year for all of our Deutsch students. We hope to have next year be just as wunderbar. 

Miranda Yuan Year 9