I love logic puzzles and think they are great for students to promote playful, logical thinking and problem solving.
The amazing Sarah Carter of Math = Love very generously shares puzzles that she uses in her classroom on her blog, and I've found time to print out two so far and put them in my room for students when they have a spare minute or two.
The first one is the A+ puzzle, which can be really tricky unless you approach it in the right way.
I'm a fan of Kahoot, Quizizz, and Quizlet Live. All three games provide a fun way to practice material, and each has its own strengths and classroom situations when it works best.
I really like the way Quizizz allows students to work at their own pace. It also shows the answer choices on students' own screens, which can be very helpful if the answers are long or quite similar to each other. I have also had classes which are not mature enough to handle the whole-class competitive aspects of Kahoot (or choosing an appropriate name), and Quizizz offers a good alternative.
As I was looking at my collection of Quizizz this week, I found a Quizizz made by another teacher for the German alphabet:
I'm going to record myself spelling words as well for my students to practice, and there are lots more possibilities for listening practice on Quizizz with this function. I hope you find it useful as well!
We're really into the semester now, and both German 1 and 2 have some big quizzes and tests coming up, so Friday was dedicated to fun ways to get students reviewing and practicing. German 2 tried Past Participles Speed Dating for the first time
A huge part of German 2 is learning the past tense. The Perfekt, or conversational past, is formed using a helping verb and past participle. Many verbs have a regular past participle which is formed following a rule.
But of course there are exceptions. And the tough truth is that students have to memorize the past participles of irregular verbs. It's not always exciting, but it is essential for future success.
To try to make it a little more fun, we've played 4 in a Row and done past participles speed dating in the past. This year, I tried a new game, Leo sagt (Leo says).
Like so many other good ideas I get, it comes from the #MtBoS (Math Teacher Blogosphere). Sarah Carter at Math = Love has blogged about playing Slope Dude Says with her algebra students. It's Simon says, but for math and about slope.
Translated to German class, it becomes Leo sagt. Leo is our beloved German online dictionary dict.leo.org. It is our go-to source for looking up all things German, including plural forms of nouns and past participles of verbs. Here's how it works:
Leo (me) says a verb, and students move their arms to indicate what category of past participle the verb has.
And, of course, if Leo doesn't say it, we don't do it.
The first class I tried it in was very enthusiastic, which helped since I tend to be a bit nervous when trying new/silly things, and it went great in all 3 classes! We did a few practice rounds and then the competition began. If a student got it wrong, s/he sat down. They were very good about being honest and policing themselves. Eventually we got down to one person left, who received a German flag temporary tattoo as a prize.
Definitely a winner. Now we just have to see how the Perfekt quiz goes next week...
I introduced weather vocabulary to my German 2 students this week. In the second lesson of the unit I introduced students to circumlocution with a group brainstorming activity: each table group got 3 or 4 small cards with a German vocabulary word on one side of each card. Their job was to brainstorm as many German clues to that word that would help a classmate guess that word. Some words were easy - for "trocken," students quickly came up with "das Gegenteil von nass." Others required more work - for "der Herbst," students came up with "eine Jahreszeit" and "kühl," but to differentiate between fall and spring, they added "September, Oktober, und November." Eventually, all of the groups has some kind of clue for each word. Then, one person from each group gathered all the cards and rotated to the next table. He or she then quizzed the students at the next table, using the clues the students had generated. I like this activity because it really pushes students to use the vocabulary they have and it feels like a game. If we have time, I usually have the students rotate to more tables, though on this day we didn't get to that. At the end of the activity, I collected the cards and used the students' definitions to make a Kahoot for them to play next class: https://play.kahoot.it/#/k/6055f543-72c4-4ee6-a8f2-0e362bc44ed1
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.
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.
Even though this was a short 4 day week, it still felt surprisingly long. It was great to have the long Labor day weekend, and I got to have coffee with my former student teacher, who is now starting his first year of teaching. I felt well-rested starting the week, but by Friday afternoon I was wiped out and could barely keep my eyes open past 8:00 in the evening! Still, there were some good things that happened this week. First and foremost, my trek up the chain of command, which I started last Friday, produced results right away on Tuesday. Just as I predicted, after about 20 minutes of work by IT during my prep period, my iPad document camera was up and running!
Hallelujah! So nice to see you, old friend!
I have still been warned that I will have to give up my iPad in October so I need to keep working on a long-term solution. The document camera I have been considering writing a grant for is on sale right now at Amazon ($85 instead of $99), so I may just buy it myself with money I earned last summer doing curriculum development and (hopefully!) be done with this annual source of frustration.
In other good news, there were lots of stars for 90% or better on the German 1 vocabulary quiz:
Two out of three classes loved it! 4th period was less impressed, but I think a few people in that relatively small class (20 instead of 30) were just sort of grouchy that day, which set the mood for everyone. Ah well, you can't please everyone all the time.
And German 1 tried Learning Apps for the first time on Friday.
So, when I look back at it now, it was a tiring week, but a lot of good things did happen. Happy weekend!
I tried playing Löffel (Spoons) for the first time this week with my German 2 students, and it was a big hit. Every student was actively involved, and I had several requests to play again. That definitely counts as a win!
Only a few students were familiar with the card game Spoons, so it took a few rounds and explanations until everyone was clear on how to play, but after that they were off, practicing German vocabulary, and having fun.
I had made sets of 4 cards for each vocabulary word. For example, there might be the German noun, the gender (der/die/das), a picture, and a sentence describing the word in German. Students tried to get all 4 cards for one vocabulary word in their hand. Our current topic is technology vocabulary, and you can access my cards here.
We had prepped for the game by working with the cards the previous class, just trying to sort them into sets of 4 so that they would have some familiarity with them before trying to collect them in a game situation. I think this helped a lot, especially since this was their first time playing Löffel.
The student without a spoon at the end of a round wrote a letter in the word "Löffel" on his or her desk with a dry erase marker. The goal was to be the person with the fewest letters at the end of the game.
You'll need to dedicate a good chunk of time to playing, especially the first time. Probably because it was new to students, we spent 25-30 minutes playing and none of the players collected all of the letters in Löffel. Still, I think it was time well spent because it really got everyone engaged with German to German vocabulary from the unit. Not bad for the last month of school!
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.
