SEC: German- Painting your Wishes onto Eggs

Painting your Wishes onto Eggs

When you were in school, did your teacher ever spring a surprise essay-writing assignment on you one morning? Well this week, the Secondary German III class had the opposite surprise. Instead of the scheduled 200-word essay on trends in fashion and lifestyles over time, the essay was instead spontaneously postponed to next week, so that the students could have a try at painting some eggs that Mr. Kienzle had left over from his Elementary Native German classes.

After learning the technique of blowing out the content of the eggs and cleaning them, the class learned about the Easter Eggs painting style of the Sorbs, an ethnic minority from Eastern Germany. On a Sorbian Easter Egg, each element and color has a symbolic meaning.

A row of triangles stands for a honeycomb, which symbolizes spring, a good harvest, and prosperity. A sun stands for light, growth, and good health. A symbol stands for a pine tree, and also for health, while finally, a flower represents growth and a good future.

With the colors, yellow stands for warmth and prosperity, red for strength, green for health and luck, blue for peace and harmony, and brown for experience.

Also, each symbol must be bordered by either a row of triangles, or “wolf-teeth”, to protect the wish from evil, or by an inverted v, or “crowfoot”, to multiply the wish.

Now have a look at the students’ finished eggs and see if you can figure out what their wish for the spring is.