Future Tense Review - Ich freue mich auf die Ferien

We're getting into the last days of the semester now, which means it's time to review for final exams.  It also means that student energy levels are very low.  Not a great combination!

My German 3/4 students learned the future tense this semester, and to help them review, I assigned a short project called "Ich freue mich auf die Winterferien" (I'm looking forward to winter break.)

The assignment asked them to write and illustrate 8 sentences about things they were planning to do during winter break.  Each sentence had to have a different verb, and they had to have at least one sentence using each of 4 different subjects: I, we, he/she/it, and they.  This required them to use different forms of werden, which is irregular. 

We reviewed the conjugation of werden and brainstormed different verbs and vocabulary before they started.  Here are some of the results:

Thanks to my colleague Vera at Bloomington High School South who created the original assignment, using the past tense and talking about Thanksgiving Break for her German 2 students, which I modified to create this one.

Want a copy of the assignment or Ich freue mich auf die Winterferien page?

Getting Ready for Finals

Just two more weeks of school until winter break!  Which means one more week of regular classes and one week of finals.  Last week we finished up the fourth unit of the semester in both German 1 and 3/4.  This week we'll be reviewing for final exams.

In German the exam is 25% of a student's semester grade.  The exam consists of 75-80 multiple choice questions and 4 or 5 speaking questions.  

I've been trying to have students work on speaking with each other throughout the semester using laminated questions cards which are in their table boxes.  They are color-coded (black for German 1 and yellow for German 3/4), and I add more cards to the boxes with each unit.  I just got the last set of cards laminated and cut out on Friday, so we should be all set to work with those on Monday!

Quote of the Month for November

November was not a good blogging month for me.  I got a bad sinus infection early in the month, missed 2 days of school, and then felt like I spent the rest of the month trying to get caught up and back in the routine.  So, no blogging.  

But it's December now, and I'm hoping to return to more regular blogging.

There was one great quote from one of my students in German 1 which both cracked me up and kind of summed up the month:

We have been working on identifying the nominative and accusative cases in German.  I asked the class, "Ok, Spielplatz (playground) is the direct object, so what case is it in?"

After a pause, the hopeful response from a student, "Upper case?"

I had to laugh.  Then, a more tentative second try, "Lower case?"  

Oh, well...