Having established initial contact with the Christmas cards we wanted to move on to the most exciting part: welcome packages filled with things that the students thought were typical of their region or country as well as things that they enjoyed. Along with this we wanted to add a letter, with a little bit more about the students involved. In Germany we brainstormed ideas of what could go in the package and then made a list of the top items we wanted to send. In the end we settled on a mixture of sweets and biscuits, a Handball, a magazine that was popular among the girls and some souvenirs from Bad Düben.
All of these items represented parts of German culture that was important to the students, as well as objects they liked and the hobbies they enjoyed.
Both German schools also wrote letters and cards about themselves to go inside and to top it off we included a map of Bad Düben annotated by the students with the places they liked to go. With that the box was filled, wrapped and posted to England and the students eagerly awaited the package from AGGS. Die Weihnachtskarten waren lediglich ein Vorgeschmack auf das, was noch kommen sollte: Willkommenspakete aus dem jeweils anderen Land mit allen möglichen regionalen und landesspezifischen Spezialitäten.
Aus England wollten wir gerne folgende Dinge schicken, die es in Bad Düben normalerweise nicht gibt:. Nur Marmite, das mochten sie nicht. Damit sie genau wussten, was das entscheidende am jeweiligen Geschenk war, haben wir jeweils einen kleinen Notizzettel dazu gepackt. When we got back from our first meeting we set up lunch time clubs within the schools and set off straight away.
To quickly get a connection going between the students, our first activity was writing Christmas Cards to each other. This is a common Christmas activity in both countries, but the German students were quite surprised to learn about how many Christmas cards people in the UK write every year when I was at school I would usually write at least Schnell fingen wir AGs in den Schulen an und hatten bald Zulauf. In November all the assistants met in London and we began getting to know each other and thinking about what projects we wanted to work on in our schools.
