By accident I ran into information about the project of a bilingual Kindergarten in Bochum named BiKiBo e.V. It’s not connected to any of those schools project. All of these school projects seems to think about founding own Kindergartens, pre-schools or nurseries.
First, there should be clear what the term Kindergarten means. The word “Kindergarten” is a loan-word to English. The semantics of Kindergarten [engl.] and Kindergarten [germ.] are different. Kindergarten [engl.] is only the last year before schools start. Kindergartens [engl.] are connected to the schools. At least, this is the concept my native speaker here at home explained to me. The Kindergarten [engl.] prepares for school. Sometimes the children already start learning how to read and write. IMHO a good translation for Kindergarten [engl.] would be ‘Vorschule’. The Kindergarten [germ.] ist better translated with pre-school or nursery.
The project of the ‘Verein zur Gründung und Förderung einer Bilingualen Kindertagesstätte in Bochum e.V.’ has a website named BiKiBo.de with a profile of the Kindergarten [germ.]. They want to start an institution for children between 6 months and 6 years. Therefore, I would call it a nursery and pre-school.
Like in the Carolinen-Schule, the pupils shall learn German and English via immersion
Interesting.
# Ruhr in English » Blog Archive » Sunny Pre-School in Gelsenkirchen and soon in Bochum on June 18th, 2010
[...] The offer of bilignual Pre-School and later adding a secondary school branch at Carolinenschule will complete the English language offers in Bochum. That’s good because I did not see any progress on another experiment. [...]