Das doofe Fischlied

It's a rainy Tuesday morning.  Spring break is 4 days away.  Everyone is still adjusting to Daylight Savings Time.  Even my clock doesn't think it's a reasonable time to be at school.

So, it must the perfect time to start working on one of the most difficult grammar topics in German - Adjective Endings!  Really, why not?

I've been prepping my German 2 students for this for at least a week.  We've been reviewing genders and cases and article endings, with a little snowman coloring thrown in to ease the pain.

So, it's time to pull out "Das doofe Fischlied" (The Dumb Fish Song).

I first learned about Das doofe Fischlied when I was student teaching in 1999.  My supervising teacher gave me a copy on a cassette tape.  This was before the days of You Tube!

I've made up a handout which has the lyrics with blanks for the article and adjective endings.  I have the students listen once just to get the jist of it and enjoy the silliness.  Then, we work though the song, noting the gender and case of the nouns in each verse.  Finally, we fill in the article endings based on prior knowledge, and listen again to try to catch the adjective endings.  

This all takes a while, and it's a lot of grammar work, so we stopped here today.  Next time we'll take the information we gathered from the song and put it in to a more standard adjective ending chart.