Our new books are here! I stopped by school yesterday after getting an email from our head custodian saying that the books had arrived and were in our classrooms. And there they were - a classroom set of shiny new textbooks in each German room! Yay!
This is especially happy news for me because the book which we has been using (which was adopted several years before I started) really didn't work well for our students. It was designed (I think) to be used for German as a Second Language instruction in Germany, not for American high school students in a semi-rural public school.
- It was all in German, so parents and resource teachers couldn't help students.
- It didn't explain grammar structures in an organized way (which drove the math teacher in me crazy!).
- And it didn't contain any cultural information (I think because it assumed students were living in Germany and were surrounded by the culture.)
Bottom line, it didn't meet our students' needs well at all, which meant that teachers had to supplement A LOT, so much that it was basically like writing a whole new textbook. Which is kind of fun, but also VERY time consuming.
After a two year process of discussing the various options, our district approved the adoption of Mosaik for German 1, 2, and 3. Since our students will each have their own tablet computer, they will have a digital textbook only, and we will have print copies in the classrooms.
It's not perfect, of course, but it's much better than what we had been working with, and I am very happy to start working with it!
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