Verb Kickers

I've noticed that a lot of my recent posts have been about things I've done with my German 1 classes.  Here's a look at what we did yesterday in German 3/4:

Our primary grammar topic this unit is subordinating conjunctions and dependent clauses.  It can be tough because the word order changes in the clause when you use a subordinating conjunction.  The verb gets "kicked" to the end of the clause, so subordinating conjunctions are sometimes called verb kickers.

In the previous class, students reviewed coordinating conjunctions (und, oder, aber, denn, and sondern) and also recorded the meaning of some of the most common subordinating conjunctions (there are lots!).  

So now students were ready to take a look at some sample sentences and to color-code the different parts of the sentence.  Here's how it looked:

After we labeled the parts of the sentence, we summarized the word order for sentences that start with the independent clause and for sentences that start with the dependent clause.   The assignment was some straightforward practice with these two types of sentences, and then we'll continue with more practice next class.