Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Did you ever hear about Little Red Riding Hood, or Cinderella?
Well, we live near this town called Marburg.
It's in Germany, and it's a lot
like the ones in those fairy tales.
Maybe that's because the men who wrote
down those stories many years ago lived there.
Their names were the Grimm brothers,
and they wrote Grimm's Fairy Tales.
I want to tell you a story, too, but it isn't a fairy tale.
It's about my own family and how we live today.
Germany has vineyards and farmland; lakes and mountains.
But my story is really more about people, so I'll tell you
about Johanna, my thirteen-year-old sister,
and Simon, my ten-year-old brother.
They're already up and leaving for school.
Mom's just getting me up for school.
My name is Sophia, and I'm seven years old.
I'm having breakfast with Mom and Dad.
We're having bread, cheese, and jam that we made
from strawberries in our garden.
Dad works in a factory that makes metal parts for cars,
like the buckles on seat belts.
He works at night, so he'll go to sleep right after I leave.
He'll get up when Johanna and Simon come home from school.
Time to meet my school bus.
The bus stop is only a couple of blocks from our house.
Our village is called Reimershausen.
My school starts at nine o'clock.
I'm in the third grade, and there are 20 kids in our class.
Our first class is English.
[singing]
Halloween is coming up, so we're reading a story
about a good witch.
Our teacher has put up English words for things
that we have here in our classroom
to help us remember them.
We finish English early, and we have a few minutes to play
until the rest of the class is ready for biology.
We're signing Anna's cast.
She hurt her arm when she fell off her bicycle.
While I'm in school, Mom's busy at home.
She likes to dry clothes outside to save energy.
But when the weather's bad, like today, she hangs them
on a rack in the basement.
Mom works three days a week in a bank in Marburg.
She has to drive about fifteen minutes to get to work.
Mom's a loan officer.
People who want to borrow money from the bank to buy a car
or house come to see her.
She helps them fill out forms
that tell how they will pay the bank back.
Then the bank can decide whether to give them the loan or not.
After school, Mom picks me
up for my guitar lesson in a nearby village.
I wanted to learn how to play the guitar when I was little,
so Mom and Dad got me a ukulele.
I learned how to play it, but I still wanted a guitar.
The last year they gave me one for my birthday
and I started to take lessons.
When we get home it's time for Mom to make dinner.
My godmother, Gerlinda, often eats with us.
She's like part of the family.
That's Frizchen.
We thought she was a boy but she turned out to be a girl.
We've only had her for three weeks,
so she's just getting to know us.
We're having vanilla pudding made with milk from the farm
where I help out after school twice a week.
After supper we go back to my school.
All the classes spent the week making things to sell tonight.
The money will help pay doctor bills for a student
in our school who has cancer.
Each class also puts on a skit just for fun.
It's Saturday morning, and on weekends,
we usually have breakfast together.
Today we're having soft-boiled eggs.
They're tricky to break open without making a mess...
so we like to use this gadget.
Guess what!
The eggs came from Gunter and Anke's farm.
I'm going there now, so you can see what it's like.
Gunter grew up on this farm, and his family has farmed this land
as far back as anyone knows.
Now, Gunter and Anke run the farm.
Anke says the land where our village sits used
to be part of their farm.
The cows always seem happy to see me.
I give the cows some hay.
Anke and Gunter's son, Carl, and his friend
like to help feed the cows, too.
The calves like to suck my fingers.
[rooster crowing]
Gunter and Anke have 40 chickens
and they each lay an egg every day.
The chickens peck around outside during the day.
At night, they go into the chicken coop
to sit on their nests.
Collecting eggs is one of my jobs.
See? The egg slides through the hole in the bottom of the nest.
Then it rolls down into a padded drawer.
It's easy to get the eggs,
because they all wind up in the same place.
Gunter uses a machine to milk the cows.
The milk goes through tubes right into a big cooler.
It will stay fresh until the dairy truck comes
to pick it up...or until I come along with my bottle
to take some milk home.
[guitar playing]
When I get home, I practice my guitar before we eat dinner.
Johanna is learning how to play the piano,
so sometimes we practice together.
[piano and guitar playing]
Gerlinda is eating with us tonight.
We're having macaroni and cheese.
After dinner, some neighbors are coming
over to celebrate Saint Martin's Day.
We go door to door with the lights we made in school.
We sing for the people in each house and they give us treats
like candy and cookies.
Saint Martin lived a long time ago.
One cold winter night, he tore his robe in half to share
with a man that didn't have anything warm to wear.
The songs we sing remind us to help other people.
Afterwards everyone has coffee and cookies together.
Most Sunday mornings we all have time to do what we like.
Dad's getting his mountain bike ready for a ride.
Today he's going up in some hills near our village.
Last year he took a big biking trip to the Alps.
After Dad comes back from his ride,
we take a trip to Marburg Castle.
Dad says Marburg was the place
where two big trading routes crossed a thousand years ago.
The castle was built to protect the town.
You can see a long way from up here.
There are thousands of old castles in Germany.
Many of them have been turned into schools or hotels,
or preserved as museums.
The Grimm brothers often had castles in their stories.
My teacher says the brothers were professors
who studied the way people speak.
They traveled all over the country asking people
to tell them stories.
That way they could hear the way people talked
in different areas.
I guess they liked the stories
so much they made them into a book.
After we look around for a while, it's time to go home.
When we get to the car, we have hot drinks and snacks
that we brought from home.
After we have supper, we go to a concert
where Johanna is singing in a gospel choir.
[singing]
There she is!
[singing]
[applause]
When we get home, it's time for bed.
Dad or Mom always reads to me before I go to sleep.
Well, that's my story.
I hope you liked it!
Goodnight!
It's Friday afternoon in late October.
Mom and I are going to a Halloween cookout
with my Boy Scout troop.
The cookout is at this park on the edge of Berlin,
the city where we live.
Sheep from the farm next door visit the park
to keep the weeds down.
We're carving pumpkins in the campfire area.
Some kids are trying ideas they've gotten
from a book somebody brought,
but most of us carve pretty much the same design every year.
This park used to be a landfill, which is where garbage
that can't be recycled is buried.
When the landfill got filled and couldn't be used anymore,
some neighbors got together and worked with the city
to turn it into a park.
Volunteers made all these paths and fences.
They didn't have much money to work with, so they used wood
and plants that grow right here as often as they could.
These pieces of wood are cut
so that they each play a different note
on a musical scale when you hit them.
See?
Tonight each family brought something to share for supper.
Dad's trying the pumpkin soup Mom brought.
My friend's father brought bread dough he's baking
in the fireplace.
We kids like to wrap the dough
around sticks to bake in the fire.
We also roast sausages and marshmallows.
Tomorrow is Halloween and our family is going uptown,
so we'll be going home soon.
It's Halloween morning, and my brothers Kale, Paul,
and I are watching a little TV.
Then I take care of my two tortoises.
This kind of land turtle is found all over Europe.
Mom says if they were living in the wild, they would hibernate.
You probably know that means they would sleep during
the winter.
So in a couple of weeks we'll put them in an old refrigerator
in the basement until spring.
They aren't fish, so they need air,
and we have to open the refrigerator every week
to give them oxygen.
Mom and I are getting some things ready
for trick-or-treaters.
Mom has wrapped up little packages of popcorn,
and I'm carving a couple of pumpkins.
It only takes a few minutes to walk to the train station.
Although we live in Berlin, going uptown is a little trip
because the city's so big.
We'll take two different trains to get there.
Berlin is the biggest city in Germany,
and has lots of tourists.
Some tours use Segways to get around.
They're steered by the person leaning a little
in the direction they want to go.
The Segways' computers do the rest.
This is a conversation bike.
The riders can all be talking together, or even eating,
while they're pedaling, because only one person steers.
And then there are tour boats on the river
that goes through town.
Today we see something we've never seen before.
This man is demonstrating the bubble blowing kits
that he sells.
He likes to have us kids try it ourselves.
This area of Berlin has lots of government buildings.
Kale's checking out the fountain in the square in front
of the Senate building.
Mom suggests that we take the train to the part of the city
where artists live and work to have lunch.
While we're in that neighborhood,
she shows us a sculpture that moves
when we put in a few Euros.
I wonder if that mechanical monster is going
out trick-or-treating tonight!
When we get home, it's time to go out trick-or-treating.
Since we won't be home when kids come here, we put the pumpkins
and popcorn outside with the sign that says,
"Please take only one.
Think of others."
We visit all the homes
around our neighborhood that have lights on.
When people open their doors, we say "Trick or treat!"
and they give us treats, but most kids don't do tricks.
When we get home, we check out our loot.
Dad's taking his remote-control helicopter out for a whirl.
I guess Paul wants it to land on his helipad.
It's 7 PM and it's time for dinner.
Tonight we're having creamed vegetables.
We all have jobs each week, and tonight it's Paul
and my turn to set the table.
After dinner, I also have to unload the dishwasher
and put the dishes away.
We usually have dinner together.
It's easier on weekends than during the week,
when we have practice and lessons.
Tomorrow is a school day.
See you in the morning!
It's Monday morning and everybody's getting ready
to go to school or work.
Before Dad leaves, he checks out a video
about the company where he works.
Dad's an engineer at a plant
that makes jet engines for airplanes.
He helps design the blades that blow hot gases
through the engine and push the plane forward.
He rides his bike twenty kilometers to work every day,
even in the winter if it isn't icy.
It takes him an hour to make the trip.
Last summer he entered a race here that had 7,000 riders,
and he came in five hundredth.
Mom always comes out to the porch to wave good-bye to Dad.
Mom wakes me up for school.
I'm having a roll for breakfast
and Mom will make me a cup of cocoa.
Paul rides his bike to school, too.
He's in the ninth grade.
I'm ready to head out on my scooter.
My school is only a couple of blocks away.
I'm in fifth grade.
My first class is English.
Today we're learning sentences we need to use in the classroom,
like "What page are we on, please?"
and "I don't understand this."
After English, our math teacher comes in.
Part of our assignment is to play a game
where we solve a crime by using math to find clues.
It's a fun way to practice math.
After I leave for school,
Mom walks with Kale to his kindergarten.
When she gets back home,
she starts some laundry before she goes to work.
Mom teaches at an animal museum.
She studied biology in school,
so she knows a lot about living things.
First, the kids who visit the museum learn
about the animals outside.
They're feeding these guinea pigs pieces
of apples and carrots.
Then the kids go inside and mom shows them some animals they may
never have seen.
After she explains how the animals live
and where they're from, she passes them
around so kids can feel what their skin is like.
This kind of lizard has smooth skin.
This one feels smooth if you rub it in one direction
but really prickly if you rub it in the opposite direction.
Mom's back from work by the time I get home from school.
I show her the good grade I got on my last test.
Then she helps me go over some homework.
Paul's going to have a drum lesson this afternoon.
But first, he and his teacher, Peter, try a little soccer.
Paul is interested in theater and acting.
He's already been in a TV ad!
Time to practice!
[drumset playing]
When Dad gets home from work, it's time to eat.
We're having pizza, salad, and apple juice.
After dinner, Paul and I both have handball practice.
We have practice twice a week.
Our team spends about an hour exercising
and practicing basic moves before we play a game.
Now we're going to play a real game.
Handball is kind of like a mix between basketball and soccer.
Kale is looking forward to being old enough to be on a team, too.
When we get home, Dad and Paul fix a leak
in Paul's bicycle tire.
They find out where the leak is by putting air in the inner tube
and then holding parts of it under water to see
where bubbles form from the escaping air.
They discover that the leak is coming from a place
that had been patched earlier.
With a little rubber cement and a new patch,
Paul's bike is ready to use for school tomorrow.
Now it's getting late, so it's time
for us to get ready for bed.
My bunk is right over my tortoise cage.
Goodnight!