So this might be a bit of a weird post for this subreddit, but I'm kinda excited and wanted to share this story with someone.

I'm currently working as an English language assistant in a German secondary school and as a general rule the standard of English is really good, even in the really young students. Germans tend to begin learning English in primary school (i.e. elementary) so that's not much of a surprise.

One of my Klasse 5 (10-12 years old) groups has been causing both me and their main teacher some problems lately though. They're an "integrated" group, meaning that there are 6 kids in the group of 20 with various learning disabilities. Surprisingly though, the skill level wasn't the problem – the problem is that they've been absolutely unwilling to actually say anything in English. We didn't even know what their skill level was!

But earlier today I had a breakthrough! Me and their main teacher were acting out a role-playing exercise and she asked me what my hobbies are. I said that I liked playing games. Then one of the kids actually put their hand up (a miracle in and of itself) and asked which games I played. I said that I play Minecraft with my brother in England and immediately the class was full of excited whispers. Suddenly they were telling me about the castles (or "cast less schloss" as they called them) they'd been building out of clay, their youtube channels, one kid even got his phone out (technically a big no-no, but I didn't have the heart to tell him) to show me a picture he'd taken of a redstone circuit he was particularly proud of.

Whilst they were doing a vocab test me and the teacher decided to change the lesson plan a little – she was completely out of her depth since she had no idea what we were talking about. I decided that we could just as easily learn animals via their minecraft knowledge – obviously most of them played the game in German but they were now talkative enough to say the foods, animal names and animal products that they already knew from their previous years of English lessons. We then played an improvised game called "On my minecraft farm", where they listed the things that they would have on their minecraft farm and why. One kid said he'd build a swimming pool in his farm for a squid, another wanted to have a spider farm.

Anyway, probably not a big deal but I was pretty proud of how the lesson turned out. They've promised to change the language of their games to English – I doubt they will, but at the very least they're trying to talk to me now.