Advent Calendars for German Teachers

There are quite a few online Advent calendars each year for German teachers and their students.  

Some years I'm better at keeping up with them than others!  It's always tricky since we have semester exams before winter break, and there's not always a lot of time to celebrate German Christmas traditions amid the review and end of semester craziness.

But here are links to some of the calendars I'm enjoying this year:

• AATG Advent Calendar: https://www.aatg.org/page/AdventKalender 

• Klett - USA Adventskalendar: https://www.klett-usa.com/adventskalender/c-3101

• Die Sendung mit der Maus Adventskalendar: https://www.wdrmaus.de/extras/mausthemen/adventskalender/2019/index.php5 

• Erster Österreichischer Dachverband Legasthenie:  https://legasthenie.at/Weihnachten2019/

Viel Spaß und schöne Adventstage!

Liechtenstein in the news

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-liechtenstein-anniversary/beer-with-the-prince-liechtenstein-marks-300th-anniversary-idUSKCN1V51S5

Liechtenstein made the news in the U.S. this week as it celebrated its 300th anniversary on Thursday.  

We're discussing holidays in German 2 and introducing German speaking countries in German 1, so we'll definitely be talking about Liechtenstein next week in both of my classes.  

This Reuters article gives a nice overview of the country and has a photo slide show of the celebrations.

I couldn't help noticing the tent behind the prince which says "Ein Land, ein Bier."

Deutsche Welle has this video in English about Liechtenstein and its 300th anniversary:

and this one from a few years ago:

Fasching

I'm happy to report that after last week's rant, there were significantly fewer bathroom requests at inappropriate times.  Hooray for flow charts and occasionally losing your temper!

So, we were able to concentrate on German, and it was a good time for that since Monday was Rosenmontag and Tuesday was Faschingsdienstag.  I taught about them in both German 1 and German 2.  (I blogged about this in 2016, too.)

I also took pictures in our local Kroger of Berliner (aka Paczki):

   

and of other Faschingsdienstag events:

Deutsche Welle has a good video in English about some of the major celebrations:

There's also a German version:

And the Tagesschau also had good coverage of this year's Rosenmontag parades, which I've cropped here (though you can watch the video with German subtitles at tagesschau.de):

My students especially enjoyed the political floats!  

I brought in Berliner for the 15 students in my tutorial that day.  I also told my German 1 students, whose class met on Faschingsdienstag, that they could bring in Berliner for the class (supplying 90 doughnuts myself was not really within my budget), and two students in one of the classes took me up on the offer.  Everyone enjoyed the celebration!

Fasching Notizen file

Three Words: Making Good Progress

Both my German 1 and German 2 classes are making good progress this week, and I felt like I was able to keep on top of things and stay organized pretty well, too.

German 1 has been working on school vocabulary using some Learning Apps:



and has learned the numbers from 0  to 1,000,000,000:

Then, on Friday, I introduced haben and the accusative case:

We've also been keeping up with current events like the start of Oktoberfest and the upcoming German elections.

German 2 has been working with clothing vocabulary, colors, and adjective endings.  The highlight of this had to be describing what my McDonald's Happy Meal toy Minion was wearing and then discovering that his hat pops off, so we can use the verbs ausziehen and anziehen:

On Tuesday, students conjugated the verbs from our current unit.  Then, each table group wrote a sentence in the present tense using one of the verbs.  As a class, we then changed the sentences into the Perfekt.  I liked this practice structure and think I will use it in the future.  My students are starting to get more confident with the Perfekt - yay!

On Thursday, I introduced that Perfekt for verbs that take sein as a helping verb.  It went well, and students had a good initial understanding.  Their assignment was a worksheet which has verbs which take both haben and sein as helping verbs, and that pushed them to think again about how we know which verbs take which helping verb.  

Links to files:

     German 1 Numbers 0 to 1,000,000,000

     German 1 Haben and Accusative Case 

     German 2 Perfekt with sein

     German 2 Perfekt with haben and sein Worksheet

Three Words: Das doofe Fischlied (Dumb Fish Song)

It was a good week in German 2.  Students had their first unit test on Wednesday, so Monday was dedicated to review.  

We played Kahoot with holidays and their German descriptions.

Then, I pulled out 4 in a Row to give students some drill on changing sentences from present tense to conversational past and from conversational past to present.  They really needed this practice, and most students really enjoyed it.

It finally occurred to me to laminate the 4 in a Row boards so that they can be reused.  Better late than never!

The test was on Wednesday.  We've moved all of our quizzes and tests to Canvas, and one thing that became clear very quickly is that my students can be very sloppy.  They had to change sentences from present tense to conversational past and from conversational past to present tense.  This required them to type the new sentence, and Canvas graded this automatically.  I can't even count the number of students who missed those questions because they misspelled a word that was in the original sentence or because they forgot a period or question mark.  I can go back and give students partial credit, which I did, but I still took off half a point for these kinds of unnecessary mistakes.  It may be a painful lesson at first, but there's no reason to misspell a word that is right in front of you or not to punctuate a sentence in high school.

Which brings us to Friday.  We started our new unit on clothing with a review of colors and coloring.  Life is good when it's Friday and you get to color in German class.  (We also had a pep rally mid-day, so this really helped everyone to settle down after that.)

We used this activity to introduce adjective endings.

And then it was time for Das doofe Fischlied:

We first reviewed definite and indefinite articles in the nominative, accusative, and dative cases and recorded them on our German Grammar reference cards.

Then, we watched this subtitled version of the song and listened for the adjective endings.

Coloring and adjective endings - pretty good for a Friday in German 2.

If you'd like a copy, the Kleidung worksheet is here.  It was modified from a worksheet at Grundschul Atelier: https://www.grundschulatelier.de/kostenlose-arbeitsblaetter/DaF-Arbeitsblatt-Kleidung.pdf 

Three Words: Finding My Rhythm

Phew.  The first full week of school is finished!  

It already feels like ages since I wrote last week's three words post.  I'm still learning names but can say I know the names of  my homeroom students, who I see every day rather than every other day.

This week's Three Words: Finding My Rhythm

It was my prep period on Thursday when I finally felt like I could take a breath and I didn't have to run around like a crazy person dealing with things that had to be taken care of IMMEDIATELY.

My students are starting to know my expectations and routines.  I'm starting to know which students need extra support and which classes are a little squirrelly.  We're most of the way through the mandatory bullying education and digital citizenship lessons in homeroom.  I still don't have AirServer, so I can't use my iPad as a document camera, but I'm making do and trying to be patient.  I've started teaching new material in both German 1 and 2.  I'm Finding My Rhythm.

German 1 was introduced to German Nouns and Gender and the first three ways to say "the":

Students in German 2 learned about ordinal numbers, holidays, and festivals:

That's a wrap!  Wishing everyone 

Ordinal Numbers, Feste und Feiertage - Updated Notes

Aaaah, summer!  Time to relax and think about changes I'd like to make for next year.  

Yesterday I updated my guided notes for ordinal numbers and holidays.  Here's what they looked like this year:

And here's the new version:

There are a couple of good videos on the topic of ordinal numbers:

And a Deutsche Welle video about folk festivals: http://p.dw.com/p/1FvMz

The notes file is here.

Back in the Routine

We're two weeks into the second semester and starting to get back into the routine.

German 1 is working on the topics of families, pets, and possesive adjectives.

Next week they'll be creating a presentation for rest of the class about their families.

Click here for the file: D1 Meine Familie Presentation Assignment

German 2 is talking about the weather, seasons, and the states in northern Germany.  We've been listening to  and watching German weather reports (and getting familiar with temperatures in Celsius!)  

This week, students will be researching the weather in a city in a German-speaking country and presenting their own weather report.

Click here for the file: D2 Wetterbericht Assignment

German 4 has been discussing food and holidays.  

Each student researched a holiday celebrated in a German-speaking country and presented to the class about it.  

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.  

Getting Ready for Fasching

Next Tuesday, February 9 is Faschingsdienstag (Mardi Gras/Fat Tuesday) is German-speaking countries.  We took some time in all of my German classes this week to learn more about it and make plans to celebrate it on Tuesday during Tutorial (our remediation/enrichment period).

I was not at school on Thursday, so I used EDpuzzle to add questions to an English video about Fasching and Karneval traditions from Deutsche Welle for two of my German 1 classes.  Students watched the video on their own computers at their own pace and completed a worksheet with the questions.  

I was back at school on Friday, so I watched the original video (without the question pauses) and discussed it with my other German 1 class.  We then completed some guided notes about Fasching.

We made plans to celebrate with doughnuts, mask making, and a parade to the other world languages tutorials on Tuesday.  One of my students asked if she could bring her trumpet and play the school fight song for the parade.  She couldn't believe it when I said yes!

In German 3/4, we watched the video in German and completed basically the same guided notes.  

On my to do list between now and Tuesday: buy jelly doughnuts and gummy bears for the people in the parade to throw to the audience.  It should be fun!