The teachers of the Primary School warmly welcome you and your child to the German School Nairobi. There are currently 61 children in Classes 1 – 4 in our Primary School, taught by 11 teachers.
Our school provides the children with a natural learning environment, where they are taught to be social, open to new experiences, in touch with reality, and future orientated. The curriculum in the School is based on the German Province of Thuringia.
A few things at the German School Nairobi are different from a typical neighbourhood Primary School in Germany. The information below will give you the most important details about our Primary School and will help both you and your child to integrate smoothly into the school community.

Most of the children who join our Class 1 come from our bilingual Kindergarten. At the beginning of each academic year, meetings are held between the Kindergarten and Primary School teachers, which help us to prepare for the enrolment of your child. Primary School teachers sit in on classes in the Kindergarten group, in order to get to know your child better (along with others, and in small groups) through play, art and craft, and through conversation.
We are not all interested in how much your child already knows. What we are observing, is how naturally your child behaves in the above mentioned scenarios, how s/he reacts to stimulus from us, and what his/her language abilities are, based on his/her age. The language ability of prospective students is of particular importance to us, as many of these children are being brought up bilingually.
It is for this very reason that we pay particular attention to the subjects German and English in the Primary School. For children whose First Language is not German, we offer lessons in German as a Foreign Language, which take place parallel to “normal” German lessons. Each child is taught according to his / her abilities in the language. The aim of this programme is to allow the child to integrate into the normal German lessons as quickly as possible.
English is taught from Class 1 for 2 lessons a week, and this is steadily increased to up to 5 lessons a week by Class 4.

In the afternoons, children can voluntarily participate in the “Afternoon Programme”, which consists of extra-curricular activities or homework supervision. The children can choose different activities from Monday to Thursday. The cost of their participation in homework supervision programme, and in the extra-curricular activities is included in the school fees.

All classrooms in our Primary School are big and bright, and are equipped with computers and have an internet connection. In addition, each classroom has a group work room at its disposal.

For German, we have lessons which are child-relevant, situation-oriented, and integrative. Reading is learnt with the help of a “phonetic table” through writing. Supported by regular spelling and grammar lessons, linguistic phenomena are specifically “drilled and practised.” As they make progress in acquiring the language, children become more independent in writing their own free texts and stories. Learning skills become important in other teaching forms, whereby the children must take increasing responsibility for their learning, for example in cross-curricular projects, or in one of the several types of “Free Study”. In this “Free Study” time, the learning goals of each child can be either set themselves, or set in advance through the weekly plan, so that the children not only can, but have to independently manage this free time available to them.

English lessons consist mainly of oral work in the first two years of the Primary School, so they do not interfere with the child’s progress in learning how to read and write in German, which is taught first at the German School Nairobi. From Class 3, more and more written elements are integrated into the lessons, and in Class 4, children already start working on the material from the Secondary School

Over the last few years, for the General Studies lessons, teachers at the school have developed special schemes of work on our host country Kenya, and these are used in all Classes.

The following extra-curricular activities are offered in the academic year 2012/2013:

• Swimming
• Drumming
• Gymnastics
• Soccer
• Tennis
• Karate
• Creative Dances
• Inline Skating
• Theatre/School play
• Strings Ensemble

Primary School Headmaster:
Matthias Haße (Class teacher class 3)

Teachers:
Petra Zanker (Class teacher class 1)
Roland Klempt (Class teacher class 2)
Martina Pichler (Class teacher class 4)
Christina Niehaus (Art, Textile, IT)
Viberti Nyakang'o (Sports)
Claudia Reim (German as a foreign Language “DaF”)
Miriam Rode (Social Studies, German as a foreign Language “DaF”)
Shital Shah, Frauke Ibe (English)
Ines Sudra (Textile, Music, Swiss education)