This week's big grammar topic in German 2 was comparatives and superlatives. To begin, I has students review adjectives and adverbs they had learned in German 1. (It was the first day back from Spring Break, so they were pretty rusty.) Then, we watched a great little video from Die Sendung mit der Maus:
This clip lead right into the need for comparatives and superlatives and a foldable:
After labeling the title flap, we labeled the three tabs:
Under the flaps we wrote instructions for each form and created an example:
And now we were ready to use our foldables for some practice:
That was a lot! So, it was a good time for a Sesamstraße video with Bert and Ernie talking about heavy and light.
Students did a self-checking Learning Apps activity based on the video (which I blogged about previously here) so I could assess their understanding.
That was plenty for the first day! Students practiced some more on their own with a worksheet: Vergleiche WS 1
We continued the next class by adding the exceptions to the rule to our foldable:
and some examples for our notes:
Again, students practiced some more on their own with a worksheet: Vergleiche WS 2.
I don't work well under pressure. I know there are some people who really need a deadline and do great, creative things at the last minute. I am not one of them. My preferred way of lesson planning and creating activities for my students is on a Saturday morning in my pajamas with a big mug of tea and nothing that must be completed by Monday. I also get a lot of good ideas while I'm on a run... So, I am thrilled to be both on spring break and finally healthy enough to go running again. And I am thrilled with what I came up with for German 2 using a Sesamstraße video about schwer and leicht (heavy and light)! Hopefully my students will find it as amazing as I do. I love Sesame Street in both English and German and am always looking for ways to use clips in class. I decided to put this video, along with a picture word guide, in a Learning Apps activity to give students practice with forming the comparative and superlative for heavy and light. I may also eventually turn it into a graded assignment in our learning management system, Canvas. I think it turned out great!
My colleague Frau Nessi and I are incredibly proud of our German 2 classes! This is the first group that she and I have both worked with using our new textbook series since German 1, and their progress is impressive!
We're already approaching the last quarter of the year, which means we're looking ahead to next year when they will be in Deutsch 3. Our goal is for German 3 to be almost exclusively in German, with the exception of some explanations of more complicated grammar concepts.
I try to make a natural, organic progression over the course of my German instruction to more and more German and less and less English. I have some of the most commonly used expressions on the wall in my room and expect students to use and understand them from early on in German 1.
I then progress from giving new instructions in English to giving them in German followed by English and then German without the English.
To get our current German 2 students ready for German 3 and using German (almost) exclusively, I'm introducing circumlocution and German-German vocabulary in small, non-threatening ways now.
Our current topic is Auto und Rad fahren (Car and bike riding). We read a short article in German from our textbook about bike paths in Germany. Students answered comprehension questions about it in German, which they've been doing since German 1, but I added in another question:
(What is a one-way street?) Most students wanted to translate it into English, but I pushed them to think about how to explain it in German using other words. We talked about how they might explain it in English to a small child without using the word one-way. Eventually most students were able to get to something along the lines of "Alle Autos fahren in nur eine Richtung. (All cars drive in only one direction.) Success!
On the last day of school before Spring Break, we played Kahoot with their current vocabulary. Students may not have noticed but there wasn't any English in the Kahoot.
It started out with identifying pictures:
Then it got a little tougher with Where is this vehicle going? and 4 possible complete sentence answers.
And What does one do here?
Finally, they were ready for questions without pictures:
They did very well, especially considering that it was the day before Spring Break. We also watched a video from Easy German, which I love because it is in German with German and English subtitles: (But I recommend you preview all videos completely before showing them in class as there is occasionally some mild profanity which may or may not be tolerated at your school.)
We'll continue on after break with German-German vocabulary crossword puzzles and word association games for vocabulary.
