Martinstag

November 11 is Martinstag (St. Martin's Day) in German-speaking countries.  It's a holiday where children make paper lanterns and parade through the streets in the evening singing traditional songs.  This was a long, tiring week at my school, so by Friday we were ready for a little culture, singing, and fun.  

In German 4 I showed this video from WDR to give students some background on the story of St. Martin.

For beginning levels, there is a good description of St. Martin's Day in English at Germany.info.

There are also handouts from Illustratoren für Flüchtlinge that have great picture vocabulary and some of the words to the songs.

There is a good matching activity for the vocabulary at LearningApps.org:

We watched and sang "Ich geh' mit meiner Laterne"

and "Sankt Martin Ritt durch Schnee und Wind."


There's also a longer text in German (with audio) from Deutsche Welle, but I haven't tried that yet with German 4.