German 1: Regular Verbs and Question Words

It's been a busy week in German 1!  

While working on the theme of school subjects and university vocabulary, students learned how to conjugate regular verbs:

To practice, students used our pronoun dice and white boards

Students also learned several new interrogative words:

They will be practicing question words by answering questions about themselves, which will prepare them for writing a paragraph soon.

And I'm most proud of this new worksheet, which I created using a great school drawing from

We also watched a great video from Easy German about college life in Germany and the U.S.  Lots of great vocabulary and topics for discussion in there!

Here are the files:

     

     Regular Verbs Notizen

     Question Words Notizen

     Question Words Worksheets

Welcome, Ziggi!

The highlight of this short week - only 3 days due to fall break, with one of those days being PSAT day when 2/3 of my students were out - was the arrival of Ziggi, my document camera!

My husband said I was so excited when it arrived that it was like Christmas morning.  I am really happy to be done dealing with all of the frustration connected with getting my iPad DIY document camera to work.  

Ziggi just connects directly to my computer by USB cable, and here's the result:

I ended up not bothering to write a grant and just bought it myself.  I figured that the time I would have spent writing a grant was worth $99 to me, and this way Ziggi belongs to me, so I can take him with me if I ever move to a different school.

Here's Ziggi in position:

and here are his first two pictures:

Two Way Prepositions Notizen file

I haven't tried video recording yet - I'm still getting used to all of the features, but hopefully that will come soon.

I spent quite a bit of time Friday after school crawling around among the cords and dust bunnies behind my desk to try to figure out the best permanent location for Ziggi.

My conclusion was that Ziggi needs an extension cord.  So that's on this weekend's shopping list.  It's definitely worth it!

Three Words: Always Making Improvements

We have a four day weekend coming up, with Monday and Tuesday off for Fall Break.  Yay!  Initially my three words were Four Day Weekend, but then I noticed that most of this post was about the evolution of my guided notes for teaching haben and the accusative case.  More on that in a minute...

We don't have any big plans for the break, but I'm going to visit my parents in Lafayette on the weekend.  Then, on Monday and Tuesday we're doing all of the stuff that is hard to schedule during the school day - doctor appointment, orthodontist appointment, and delivery of a new washing machine.  I'm most excited about the last one - with 2 teenage boys in 3 fall sports having a reliable washing machine is a must!  This is my first year working full time since having children, and my husband works full time, and I just don't know how people get all of this stuff done with all the adults working full time.  

Ok, back to German:

German 1 took their unit test on Schule, numbers, haben and the accusative case on Friday.  I'm about a third of the way through grading them, and they're doing pretty well.  In my first class of 30 students, 10 scored 90% or better.  

My notes on haben and the accusative case continue to evolve.  Two years ago we made a foldable:

I liked the foldable, but it was a bit cramped, so last year I tried a different format:

Also pretty good, but I felt like maybe a foldable was more time and setup effort than I wanted to expend for this topic, so this year I went back to more straightforward guided notes:

I think I like this best - it focuses on the essential elements without overwhelming students with too much information this early in the process.

I do still love German Sentence Dissection and plan to use it in the spring when we learn the dative case and indirect objects.  I find that as we go on, students are frequently telling me that they don't know how to figure out the cases.  Usually it's because they haven't taken the time to read the sentence and analyze what it means, so my plan is to always insist on the Sentence Dissection Steps when we're working on cases from second semester of German 1 onward.

Help yourself to whatever you like best:

     2015 Haben and Accusative Foldable file

     2016 Haben and Accusative Sentence dissection file

     2017 Haben and Accusative Guided Notes file