Easy German Reise nach Dresden - Yule Blog

 

Easy German Reise nach Dresden Trip to Dresden

A tool I find really useful is Edpuzzle.  I've blogged about it before, and I really like it for cutting and adding questions to online videos.

This video is the first 3 minutes of a new Easy German video filmed in Dresden.  The whole video is pretty good but probably a bit long for students' attention spans.  There is also the word "Scheiße" and some consumption of alcoholic beverages (by adults) later in the video, so it may not be something you want to show in your classes, depending on your school's policies and the maturity of your students.

However, the first three minutes show some beautiful sights in Dresden and provide great opportunities to use weather, clothing, and travel vocabulary, which are all German 2 topics in the district where I most recently taught. 

I made a one page worksheet to go along with my video.  Click on this link if you'd like a copy.

Start / Stop / Continue in 2023 - Yule Blog Challenge

 

Start / Stop / Continue in 2023 

As a math support teacher, I do less of the initial instruction but work with students more individually or in small groups when they have questions.  I'm happy to report that they have lots of questions, and I love helping them.  

One thing, though, that I want to stop is telling them information that they have in their notes. Instead I need to start prompting them to reference those notes.  

It's so much easier and faster just to answer their question, but it benefits them more in the long run if I help them become more independent in their learning.  Particularly middle schoolers don't automatically think to look back at the notes they took in class if they get stuck while doing their homework.  It seems obvious to us as teachers, but it isn't a habit they've developed yet.  If I can make sure my students learn to do this in middle school, I've planted a seed for their success in high school.

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

 

My Favorite Lesson of 2022 - Yule Blog Challenge

 

My Favorite Lesson of 2022 - Slope Dude

One of the joys of returning to math teaching in 2022 after 8 years of teaching German is that I got to teach about slope, which means I got to introduce my students to Slope Dude.

I first learned about Slope Dude from Sarah Carter at Math=Love, and I've wanted to teach a lesson using him ever since.  This fall, I got my chance!

I was working with a small group of seven pre-algebra students who were being exposed to the concept of slope for the first time.  We started with the video

and played Slope Dude Says.  It did not disappoint!  My students got very into it, and the competition between the final two was intense.  

Then, we drew pictures of the four types of slope in our notes

and color coded our names based on the type of slope in each line segment. (I missed a few here!)

Finally, we progressed to finding the numerical slope of a line from a graph.  

It was a lot of fun, and my students definitely finished the day with a good conceptual understanding of slope.  I could hear them saying "puff, puff positive" and "nice negative" - music to my ears!

A Success Story from 2022 - Yule Blog Challenge

I read about the MTBoS Yule Blog Challenge on a blog I follow and thought this might be a good way to return to blogging.  The challenge is to blog 12 times during your winter break, and there are prompts to get you started.  I'm starting with

A Success Story from 2022

My success story from 2022 is a pretty big one for me personally - I returned to teaching.  

I took the 2021-22 school year off and wasn't sure if I would return to teaching afterward.  When I started looking at options for this school year, I knew that I was only interested in a part time position.  Unfortunately, the district where I worked for the past 10 years would only let me return full time.  

Then, friends put me in touch with the principal of St. Charles Borromeo School, a K-8 Catholic School which is a 15 minute walk from my house.  (Our younger son went to preschool there.) They were looking for a Spanish teacher and knew I had taught German and had taken some Spanish.  Sadly, I don't know enough Spanish to teach it, but when I said I was also licensed in math and really enjoy supporting struggling students, the idea of my position as math support teacher started to take shape.

I help the middle school math teacher with a 6th grade math class and a 7th grade pre-algebra class.  The middle school is on a block schedule, so I work every other day from 10:30-2:30. I mostly work with students individually or in small groups, and I love it!  It's a wonderful way to return to the classroom and return to math teaching without being overwhelmed.  I'm so happy to be back!

2022 Update

 Here's what I've been up to in 2022:

• Two elbow surgeries and one sinus surgery

• A trip to Germany to visit our son at the end of his exchange year in Schwebheim, Bavaria.  This was our first major trip since 2019 - it was wonderful to travel again!

• A return to teaching as a part-time middle school math support teacher at St Charles Catholic School.  I work every other day from 10:30-2:30, and the school is a 10 minute walk from our house.  It's a wonderful way to return to the classroom, and I'm so happy to be there.

I still love (and miss!) German teaching and creating lessons for German, so I'll definitely keep my blog up for others to use.  I might even post lessons or ideas if I see something I just can't resist sharing.

Update, short version

When I last blogged in 2020, I was teaching high school German online and in person simultaneously during the continuing pandemic.  

By the spring of 2021, it was clear to me that I needed to make a change, which sadly meant leaving the German program I had built up over the last 8 years.  The original plan was to teach middle school math during a more normal school year, but the Delta variant and life circumstances intervened, and I'm watching this year of pandemic teaching from the sidelines.

When I told people I was taking the year off, they asked what I was doing with all my free time.  I loved this Twitter post as an answer:

 

I've been loving having time to run, quilt, read, bake, sleep, and do crossword puzzles.  But some days it takes most of my energy to get out of bed and take a shower.

I've been taking a Russian class, something I haven't done since 1994.  I've forgotten a lot of the grammar, but a surprising amount of vocabulary is still in my long-term memory.

I've been going to lots of medical appointments.  It turns out that you can get severe tennis elbow from too much typing while hybrid teaching.  (Another reason I haven't blogged.) It also turns out that secondary trauma is a real thing, which isn't fixed by taking a few days off and some self-care.

I've been amazed by the understanding and compassion of people.  I've been heartbroken by the cruelty and selfishness of people.

I've been grieving the (non-COVID) death of my father and the COVID deaths of more than 5 million people worldwide.

I've been slowly healing, and most importantly, I've been realizing this:

I am a teacher.  Not by profession or job title, but by vocation, by calling.  I love taking difficult topics and making them fun and understandable to students.  This has always been me, and it isn't changed by where or if I'm working.  

I don't know what comes next in my teaching career.  If the pandemic has taught me anything, it's that the future is hard to predict.  But I know I'll continue to be a teacher.

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!