It all began innocently enough, with the sharing of our homework, as we do every class period. The stories the students wrote about the Battle of Teutoburg were, to put it lightly, surprisingly hardcore. The depth of emotion and the descriptive power of each of them was beyond anything I could have ever expected, giving us such treasures as, "Nur mein Hund hält mich warm in der Nacht... ich vermisse meine Familie," and "Das Blut meines Feindes fließt in die kalte Erde," and "Es war still. Ich sah nur den Tod."
These stories will be hung up on the wall, if not framed, for future classes to view in awe-struck wonder.
The Schatzsuch was, in short, a devious scheme on my part to force the students to use their knowledge of basically all we've learned so far this year grammatically to locate and then describe (afterward) an assortment of "Squinkies" that I hid all throughout the school in as odd (yet safe) of places as I could find. I have no idea what Squinkies are aside from "$4.99 at Walgreens" and "easy to hide," but they seemed cute, and 5th graders went nuts over them and had to be convinced not to take them from their hiding spaces, so I guess I stumbled onto a fad of some kind.
Anyway, the class was divided into two groups, and I gave them a sheet of clues describing where to find all the different Squinkies. The groups set out to find them all, and then had to describe to me afterward both what they found and where they were.
The girls' group won by a margin of about 30 seconds.
After lunch, the tables turned. The class hid the Squinkies and wrote clues, and then I had to find and describe them. The clock ran out for me when the bell rang at the end of the day, with ONE Squinkie left! Oh well.
Suffice to say, fun was had. We laughed, we cried, we GERMAN'ED.
And that was that.
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