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Too much screen time? This German school has the answer

Some of the teachers at Phorms, a network of seven bilingual schools in Germany, are taking lessons out of the classroom to increase children’s engagement with both learning and the natural world.

Too much screen time? This German school has the answer
Photo: ArturVerkhovetskiy/Depositphotos

Remember those halcyon days of childhood, when you would ride your bike for hours or climb trees with friends? With the introduction of modern technology and increased road traffic, many children are missing out on this experience entirely.

Instead an increasing number of children in Germany between the ages of three and 13 spend almost an hour-and-a-half watching TV each day. On top of that, they spend almost the same amount of time staring at a computer or smartphone screen. That’s around three hours of being indoors and inactive every day.

Find out more about Phorms Education in Germany

Maria Tasker, a British biology teacher at the Phorms school Josef-Schwarz-Schule in Neckarsulm, Baden-Wurttemburg, understands the importance of fresh air for children. She also believes that the best way to learn biology is by being immersed in the natural world. It’s for these reasons that Maria regularly takes her classes outside for practical lessons. Unlike some schools, these lessons are not infrequent field trips but an integral part of her teaching programme.

For two days last term, Maria took her year 5 and 6 classes out into a copse close to the school to search the leaves for invertebrates, beetles, snails and woodlice. 

Photo: Phorms

“The children were completely overwhelmed as the creatures were literally exploding out of the leaves. It makes them so happy,” says Tasker. 

Like some other teachers at Phorms, Tasker started her working life in the field she now teaches. As a biology graduate she gained her passion for natural sciences from being outdoors when she was young and wants to pass this interest onto her pupils. 

“As a teacher, you can’t succeed in passing on real deep knowledge, beyond pure learning by rote, if you don’t allow students to feel reality,” she says.

Tasker is not the only teacher at a Phorms school who is using nature to help her students learn. Whilst her classes involve direct study of nature, Cristina Follmer, a teacher at the Phorms Taunus Campus in Frankfurt, also takes her music classes outside. 

“The wood gives us natural music. Children need that,” says Follmer, who, like Maria Tasker, didn’t follow a straight career path to her job. The daughter of German parents, earlier in life she led the ‘Coralito’, a small choir at Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, Argentina. But even there, Cristina Follmer endeavoured to sing outside as often as possible. “There’s always an echo inside,” she says, “but not in the woods. It’s all voice there – not the echo of an often soulless man-made building.”

Follmer teaches years 1 to 4 and encourages them to collect natural instruments from the wood and make music with them, sticks for claves, stones for cymbals and xylophones. 

“I see time and time again that children need this. None of them ever refuse to be taught outside!”

Photo: Phorms

Both Follmer and Tasker find Phorms to be open to their approach to education. Follmer feels the school really understands her way of teaching. 

“The school understands what the children need, and that always teaching in a classroom isn’t the right way.”

Some years ago this kind of teaching would have been seen as somewhat radical but there is an increasing body of research which says that time spent outside in the natural environment is beneficial to health and learning. Stress hormones reduce and the brain is rested and more ready to learn and to be stimulated. A team of environmental educators has found that the natural environment stimulates children’s cognitive abilities but increasingly children are stuck indoors, simply expected to absorb facts or distracted by screens where they create fantasy worlds rather than running and playing in nature, even when it is close by.

Tasker recalls her own childhood and how her exposure to nature impacted on her. 

“I have lots of memories about how it feels to be outside. My teaching is about remembering the source of my own interest.” 

Boris Braun, is secondary school science teacher at Phorms Campus Hamburg. He works with children older than Follmer and Tasker but his ethos is the same.

“In lessons in enclosed classrooms they would be presented with content and exercises, and have to reproduce them, so they would have little scope for personal growth and self-awareness. Whereas outside the classroom, they can experience the lesson’s contents with their senses and apply what they learn straight away. It also means they are able to concentrate for longer.”

Photo: Phorms

Photo: Phorms Education

Nature has a beneficial impact on both the brain and the body. Although these teachers alone can’t stem the trend of children spending less time outside, they are leading the way to making learning less stressful and more immersive. Making their classes about learning from life around us rather than treating children simply as vessels to be filled with facts and knowledge, the teachers at Phorms are leading the way in how to engage children in nature and the world around them.

Find out more the bilingual network of Phorms Education schools

This article was produced by The Local Creative Studio and sponsored by Phorms Education.

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PROPERTY

10 essential tips for avoiding rental scams in Germany

Rental scams are on the rise in Germany, and fraudsters are becoming more sophisticated than you may think. We spoke to a couple who were scammed in Berlin to put together tips to stay safe while house hunting.

10 essential tips for avoiding rental scams in Germany

When it comes to settling in Germany, one of the most stressful and difficult tasks you’re likely to face is finding a place to live.

With the country in the grip of an ever-worsening housing shortage, there aren’t enough rental properties to meet the high demand – especially in big cities like Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt – and the flats that are available can often stretch even the most healthy of budgets. 

With renters desperate to find affordable homes, crafty scammers have seized the chance to place fake ads on the market, often in dream locations with lower-than-average rents. 

While some of these scams may be easy to spot, others can be highly sophisticated, with fraudsters setting up professional-looking websites and even allowing hopeful tenants to view their properties in person.

Recently The Local reported on a Polish couple who lost around €7,000 through a rental scam in Berlin. The scammers had sublet a beautiful Altbau apartment in the popular district of Neukölln and created an advert for it via a fake letting agent website, then arranged for people to use a key box to view the property while the real tenants were away. 

READ ALSO: How sophisticated scammers are targeting desperate Berlin tenants

Despite checking the contract over with legal experts from their local tenants’ association, nobody saw anything out of the ordinary – that is, until they tried to access the apartment and found a family already living there.

So, how do you protect your hard-earned savings and steer clear of scammers while looking for a new home?

Here are 10 important ways to protect yourself from rental scams. 

1. Be alert to suspicious signs 

The key to avoiding scammers in Germany is to be fully clued up on the warning signs. Was the listing for the property uploaded in the middle of the night, is the advert thin on details or written in bad German or English, and does the offer feel too good to be true?

Though it would be nice to believe there are still cheap flats to be found, finding an attractive property at an overly reasonable price is usually a red flag. 

Hamburg

Modern apartments in Hamburg. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Daniel Bockwoldt

If someone claiming to be a landlord contacts you out of the blue, that’s also your cue to run a mile. With so many people looking for housing, most letting agents and landlords will have more than people looking to rent their properties without needing to get in touch with people themselves. Anyone who does is more than likely to be a scammer.

2. Rule out landlords who say they live abroad

One of the major warning signs to look out for is a landlord who claims to be renting the property from abroad, or who says they are out of the country for other reasons, like a last-minute business trip.

That’s usually a scammer’s way of excusing the fact that they won’t be able to meet you personally or even show you the property before you rent it.

“When the country the landlord lives in appears then I would say there’s a really big chance this is a scam,” said Kuba Rudzinski, one of the victims of the Berlin-Neukölln rental fraud.

Even if the excuse seems plausible, your best bet is to ignore anyone who tries to sell you a story about living abroad and simply move on with your house hunt.

READ ALSO: Why Germany’s housing crisis is expected to drag on

3. Do your research online

Before committing to anything, take time to do some thorough research to scope out the property, landlord and letting agent. 

Running the pictures and text used in apartment listings through a search engine like Google will help you quickly identify stock photos and text stolen from other listings. For pictures, this is known as a reverse image search. 

A laptop

Photo by 2H Media on Unsplash

It’s also worth checking that any websites you’re sent to are fully functional and not copies of other letting agent sites, and that any email addresses match the website domain. 

READ ALSO: How much deposit do I have to pay when renting in Germany?

4. Visit the property and ask around 

Never agree to rent a property without seeing it in person first. Arrange a viewing and take the opportunity to ask questions about the property and the neighbourhood. 

Kuba also recommends speaking with the neighbours in the building to check if the property is genuinely being rented. 

“Go to the place before and ask the neighbours, is this flat really for rent? Because these people generally know,” he said. “You’ll need to convince yourself to do it of course, but just ask in the building, ask on the floor where the flat is.”

5. Don’t transfer the full deposit in advance

Advance payments for anything, whether it’s furniture, a deposit or getting a chance to view the property, should be considered a major red flag.

Under German law, you are usually only expected to pay the deposit by the start of the agreed rental contract – and certainly not several months in advance.

Euro notes lie next to some house keys on a table.

Euro notes lie next to some house keys on a table. Photo: picture alliance/dpa/dpa-tmn | Andrea Warnecke

You are also legally entitled to pay your three months’ deposit in three instalments on top of your first three months’ rent after moving in, so definitely be cautious of landlords that place pressure on you to transfer a large lump sum.

If you’re really concerned, look into alternatives for paying your deposit, such as Kautionversicherung (deposit insurance) or a Mietkautionssparbuch, where you open a bank account and pledge the amount to the landlord, rather than transferring the money directly. 

6. Insist on meeting the landlord or letting agent in person

If a landlord or letting agent refuses to meet you in person or insists on conducting all communication online, they’re probably not who they say they are. 

Insist on meeting face-to-face to verify their identity and ensure they have a legitimate connection to the property.

7. Avoid sending documents straight away 

Not all rental scams are about getting money from you directly: many scammers are simply after your personal details for the purposes of identity theft.

Be wary of providing personal documents or sensitive information before you’ve verified the legitimacy of the rental agreement, especially when it comes to things like passport scans or other forms of ID. 

READ ALSO: Five common rental scams in Germany and how to avoid them

8. Seek legal advice from experts

If you’re unsure about any aspect of the rental agreement or if something seems suspicious, seek advice from legal experts or tenants’ associations. 

However, be aware that this isn’t always a cast-iron guarantee that a tenancy is legitmate. Over the past few years, fraudsters have become increasingly sophisticated, even down to producing water-tight rental contracts for would-be tenants. 

An estate agent hands over keys to an apartment. Photo: picture alliance/dpa/dpa-tmn | Christin Klose

According to civil lawyer Emilia Tintelnot, becoming a member of a tenants’ association can be a good way to get affordable legal advice, and it can also be helpful to set up legal insurance to ensure you can access help when you need it without having to pay lawyers’ fees up front.

9. Be wary of stereotypes 

Avoid making assumptions based on stereotypes or preconceived notions about someone’s gender or nationality, as this may cause you to overlook things you might otherwise see as warning signs.

In Kuba’s case, the fact that the fraudsters were German made them appear more legitimate in his eyes, as Polish people tend to see Germans as law-abiding and trustworthy. 

Be aware that scammers can come from any cultural background and may use a variety of tactics to deceive unsuspecting renters.

10. Keep an extensive paper trail 

Document all communication, agreements, and transactions related to the rental process, including phone numbers and any bank details provided.

According to the Berlin police, this type of evidence can be crucial for an investigation if you do suspect a scammer.

While evidence can differ across cases, “pictures, contact details used by the perpetrators, original documents, bank details with payment receipts” are particularly helpful for investigators, and could help the police stop the scammers for good. 

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