Possessive Pronouns with Easy German

Sometimes everything just comes together!  I've blogged about my love of Easy German videos and also how useful EDPuzzle can be for teachers.  

Put them together, add a good worksheet to go along with the video, and you've got a great lesson to teach possessive pronouns (my, your, his, her, etc) in German 1 or to review them in German 2 or 3.  Enjoy!

Here are the links:

Original Super Easy German Possessive Pronouns Video

My EDPuzzle Video Version

Possessive Pronouns Worksheet

A Favorite Resource of 2022 - Yule Blog Challenge

A Favorite Resource of 2022 - Easy German

Ok, I'm cheating a little here since Easy German has been a favorite resource of mine for some time, so it's not new to 2022.  I've blogged about it quite a bit.  But it continues to be great and keep getting better, so it continues to deserve mention.

Recently they posted a video about Relativsätze, relative clauses.  This is a topic my German 3 students often found confusing, and the video explains it very well.

I made some guided notes to go along with the video.

Click the link if you'd like a copy: Relativsätze Relative Clauses notes

 

German Joke for students learning "werden"

It's been a very long time since I last blogged, and much has changed since my last post.  

I was inspired to write again by a video from Easy German with cheesey jokes which might be useful to other German teachers, so I'll post about that and save updates for another day (maybe).

Warning to K-12 public school teachers: this video has two or three words that would be inappropriate in most schools, so be sure to preview it before watching with your students and/or show only clips.

In spite of a few bathroom language moments, this is a sweet video, especially since Janusz is Manuel's dad.  I could imagine asking students to memorize and present one of the jokes as a short speaking assignment or extra credit opportunity.  

My personal favorite is at 11:33 and uses the verb werden, which I've generally taught in 2nd year.  

It's a pretty easy joke to understand in terms of language level, and what I like about it most is the way it contains both uses of werden:

1. As a helping verb to form the future tense - Wir werden sehen.  We will see.
2. As its own verb meaning to become - Wir werden Seen.  We're becoming lakes.

Ist das nicht fabelhaft?  Thanks, Easy German team.  Ach, I love teaching German!  

Update: I've updated my guided notes to include the joke video

     

and made a Google Slides presentation for the lesson.

I'm happy to share - just leave me a comment, and I'll send you a copy!

Friday Fun: Speed Dating, 4 in a Row, and Quizizz

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  

and played 4 in a Row

Both activities got thumbs up from students and got them actively practicing past participles, kennen, and wissen.

German 1 has their next unit test coming up, and we played Quizizz to review:

All in all, it was a good Friday.

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Clothing, Nouns and Cases

German 2 finished up their first unit, Feste Feiern, and took their test on Wednesday.  Results were fantastic - 88% average across my three classes.  I'm proud of their hard work!

Now we're on to Kleidung (clothing).  Students started the day on Friday with coloring.  

Life is good when you get to color in German class on a Friday.  One of my students told me, "I love you, Frau Swank!"  I warned her that she might not love me as much by the end of class...  

Some of my students wanted to color for the whole class, but I was not going to pass up an opportunity like this to talk about article and adjective endings!

We looked at the sentences in detail, observing how the article and adjective endings changed in the accusative case depending on the gender and number of the clothing item.  

Then, students had the information they needed to describe one item of clothing they were wearing, such as

If they struggled, they just needed to look at the sentences below.  I love it!

Now it was time to flip over to the back and really review cases with my favorite example:

First we analyzed the English sentence, 

and reviewed how to figure out what's what in a sentence.  I emphasized that there aren't shortcuts - they have to understand the sentence and do the thinking.  (My student didn't love me quite as much at this point.)

We reviewed our articles charts

and finally wrote the sentence in German.

That was the end of our notes, and it was time to practice.  I've noticed that students are more willing to try difficult things with dry erase markers instead of pencil and paper, so I created 4 practice sentences that fit in page protectors for table group practice.

I heard some great conversations among students using words like direct object, indirect object, accusative case, and dative case.  It made my German teacher heart sing!

For some groups, those 4 sentences were enough of a challenge, and I didn't want to overwhelm them.  Other groups wanted to try level 2:

and even level 3:

This structure really let me differentiate and individualize.  (It is also wonderful that none of my German 2 classes has more than 24 students this year, so I can work with groups more individually without other groups getting off track and on to their cell phones!)

Students finished up with work time for their assignment:

with one of these two pictures on the back:

Here are my files:

     Nouns and Cases Review Notizen

     Cases Review for Dry Erase Pockets

     Nouns and Cases Review Worksheet 

Past Participle Practice with Leo sagt

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...

Tackling Subordinating Conjunctions in Deutsch 2

Our current German textbook, Mosaik, introduces coordinating conjunctions in 2nd year but doesn't introduce subordinating conjunctions until 3rd year.  

This year my colleague and I decided that we wanted to give our 2nd years at least an introduction to subordinating conjunctions so that they had more structures to say some of the things they want to express in their writing and speaking and so that subordinating conjunctions wouldn't be so overwhelming in 3rd year.  Denken, glauben, and scheinen are part of the vocabulary in this unit, so this gives them a structure for stating opinions.

I started out our first lesson by playing Conjunction Junction while students were doing their bell work - always a hit!  

Students learned coordinating conjunctions in the previous unit, which was before winter break, so we began our discussion by reviewing those.  They're pretty solid on those, though aber vs. sondern is still a bit tricky for some.

Then, I introduced subordinating conjunctions as verb kickers:  

Time for Color with Purpose: blue = independent clause

                                               red = dependent clause

                                                orange = conjugated verb

                                                  green = conjunction

We've decided to concentrate on 10 frequently used conjunctions for now and add more next year.  Those conjunctions are 

We're espeically emphasizing dass so that students can express what they know, believe, or think.

We finished the first day with more investigation of where the verbs are when we have sentences in the past tense.  

I gave students an assignment on Canvas which had them practice the meaning of the subordinating conjunctions and rewrite some simple sentences starting with "Ich weiß, dass..."  The assignment in called D2 L3A Subordinating Conjunctions 1 Aufgabe and is public if your school uses Canvas.

On the second day, we went in to more detail about the word order when the independent clause is first and when the dependent clause is first.  More Color with Purpose!

I ended each section with some open-ended examples.  Some classes were more creative than others!

This time students did a written assignment, which we discussed and edited the following class.

Here are the Subordinating Conjunction Guided Notes and the Subordinating Conjunctions 2 Worksheet.  

German 2: Präteritum

While German 1 has been wrapping up their unit on regular verbs and question words, German 2 has been learning the narrative past (Präteritum).

We started with Präteritum for Regular Verbs:

and then added in irregular verbs:

and haben and sein:

We summarized what we had done so far and took a quiz

before reviewing modal verbs and adding in modals in the Präteritum:

There are some changes I'd like to make to the Präteritum for Modal Verbs notes - slightly different example sentences as well as changes to the review of modals in general, but here are the current notes:  https://drive.google.com/open?id=1rsFJLu5RWOTMSwBAi6XjiqoTS1pC08nQ 

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