Landeskunde Bayern

http://www.katelein.com/

One of the great things about being on break is that it gives me a chance to explore new resources and plan new activities in a more thorough way than I have time for during the school year.

Today I was thinking about our first Landeskunde (geography and culture) unit for German 2: Bayern (Bavaria).  Over the course of German 2 and German 3, students study each of the 16 German Bundesländer in detail.  I've taught the German 3 states before, but this year will be my first to teach the German 2 states.  

Bayern is the first one, and surprisingly, since it is the largest state and most well-known in the U.S., I didn't have a lot of material on it yet.  So, I visited one of my go-to sites for culture videos: Deutsche Welle.  

Their travel program Check-In has a 25 minute video focusing on Munich:  http://dw.com/p/1IsEV

I had time to watch the whole video and create a worksheet to go along with it.  This could be completed as a whole-class activity or individually.  

The first part of the worksheet refers students to our textbook, Mosaik, but the information is also readily available online.  

The back page follows the video and uses the adorable children's map of Munich that I found online.  

Here's a link to an editable copy of my Landeskunde Bayern Notizen.

German Sentence Starters Posters

Here's my schedule for the day: driving children to one cross country practice and two soccer practices, all at different times and at two different schools.  It must be the week before school starts!  In between, I'm trying to get a little school work done.  

I little while ago I found these great Sentence Starters Posters online.  There are 72 different words and phrases, 3 to a page. 

I think they'll be great for my German 4 students to help them in their writing.  The site has some other German posters, including numbers, seasons, and weather.  

Target Language Instructions

I try to use German as much as possible in all of my classes so that by the time students are in the advanced levels we are using the target language almost all the time (3rd year - still need to explain some of the more difficult grammar in English) and exclusively (4th year).  

One difficulty I notice students having is understanding instructions that are written in German.  It's a challenge because I don't want students to miss a question on a quiz or test because they didn't understand the instructions but knew the material.  On the other hand, I've noticed that if I write the instructions in both German and English, they don't bother to read the German instructions at all.  Then, when I take away the English, they are lost.

What to do?  

Recently when browsing on one of my go-to websites for German materials and ideas, ISL Collective, I came upon these great pictures of directions and their meanings.  

The author, Martha from Austria, has very kindly shared them for free.  (You have to join ISL collective to download materials, but it is free.)  I plan to make posters from them for my room next year.  

Here's the link to the Arbeitstechniken worksheets and flashcards.

Syllabus Scavenger Hunt

I've been updating the syllabus for my classes next year.  Every year it gets a little easier because I'm more satisfied with what I used the year before.  The big challenge is to try to put all the important information into a format that students will actually read.  

Here's what my German 1 syllabus looks like:

This year I've decided to do a scavenger hunt activity with highlighters on the first day of school with my German 1 and 2 classes.  

Students will highlight the answers to the top 4 frequently asked questions - things like

"Did I miss anything when I was absent?" 

"If I get a lower score on my test retake, can I keep my first score?"

"What's the website for the online textbook?"

I hope this activity will push students to read the syllabus more closely and reduce the number of times I have to answer these questions.  When they ask, I can just remind them that the answer is highlighted on their syllabus, and hopefully they will learn to be more self-reliant.  

German Grammar Reference Cards

One of the things I did last year with my students which worked really well was German Grammar Reference Cards.

My students have an online textbook which they can access on their school-issued laptops, but one thing that I've noticed is that they are really lazy about getting them out to look up something they can't remember.  And, the reference charts in the back of the book don't contain all of the information my students frequently need.

So, I developed a chart for students to complete and keep in their binders for quick reference.  If they have the kind of binder with the clear pocket on the cover and back, I encourage them to keep it in there.  

We fill in sections as we cover them, often completing the section of the chart as a review before a test or quiz.  The chart above is one side of the German 1 chart.  I didn't take a picture of the completed second side, but here's the blank version:

It worked really, really well!  The only thing I would change for German 1 is to leave off the adjective endings.  We did touch on them a little but putting them in the same chart as the der and ein words tended to confuse them.

I also gave grammar reference cards to my German 3 students.  Theirs went on to a second page.  The first page is the same as German 1.  Then, they had

Next year I'll be teaching German 2, so I created a reference card for them.  

If you'd like a copy of any of these, click on the links below:

     German 1 Grammar Reference Card

     German 2 Grammar Reference Card

     

     German 3 Grammar Reference Card

The Teacher becomes the Student

One of the things I'm doing this summer is taking a beginning college Spanish class online.  I just decided it would be a fun thing to do with some of my free time.  My older son has taken 2 years of Spanish in middle school and plans to continue in high school, and there are lots of opportunities to practice it, so I thought why not?

My class started on Monday.  It's through Ivy Tech, our community college, and is all online.  I've never taken an online class, so that in itself is a new experience.  It's definitely more convenient than having to go to class - I can do my work in my pajamas!

The other really neat thing about it is that the textbook is from the same publisher as the German textbook we use at my school.  So, I get a chance to try out the Spanish version of our online German textbook from a student perspective.

I guess once you're a teacher, you can't really stop yourself from looking at things from a teacher perspective.  As I'm working on my assignments, I find myself analyzing them: are they helpful or frustrating, are there things I could use in my German classroom, what would my students think of this? 

I'm also a bit jealous because there are a lot more resources and practice activities in the Spanish book than in the German book.  I guess that's just how it is when you teach a language that is more commonly taught.

One cool resource I found today is ToonDoo.  I was actually looking for Toonlet, which is a web site suggested in my class for creating cartoon dialogs, but the web site hasn't been responding the past two days.  As I was trying to connect to it, I found a list of other cartoon creation websites and went to ToonDoo.  Here's what I've created so far

It's fun and pretty intuitive to use.  The one negative is that you can't type foreign characters or accents within the program, even if you have those symbols installed on your computer.  However, you can copy and paste from a Word document and the special symbols will appear.  

I think my students would have a lot of fun with this, though they would probably spend quite a bit of time playing with all of its features before they got down to using it to practice German.  I think if I created a Word document for them to copy and past from, that would make the special symbols easier to access.  

Always fun to find another resource to try!  Hasta luego!

Deutsch 4 - Target Language Participation Rubric

School has been out a week now, which means I'm enjoying the relaxed pace of summer and the chance to think ahead to next year.  Often this means working on new ideas and plans in the morning while enjoying a mug of tea and still wearing my pajamas.

I will be teaching 5/6 time again next school year.  I will have two sections of German 1, two sections of German 2, and one section of German 4.  I didn't teach any German 2 last year, and I missed it, so I'm very happy to get to teach it again. 

The exciting news for our German program is that we have fifteen students enrolled in German 4, which is enough to have a separate section and not need to combine it with German 3.  

Last year was the first year since I have been at BHSN that we offered German 4 at all, but there were only 5 students, so I had to be combined with German 3.  Since we had new textbooks for all levels and the topics in the third year book were new to the German 4 students, it worked fine to combine the groups and differentiate as needed to challenge the German 4 students.  

But now that we have enough students, we can offer a true German 4 class.  The textbook we'll be using is Denk Mal! from Vista.

One of the things I really want to emphasize in German 4 is target language usage.  In the 3/4 class this past year, I spoke German to students most of the time but still used English to explain new grammar concepts.  I probably didn't push students to use German as much as I should have.  

In German 4, there won't be any new grammar topics - just review, so I want to use German exclusively.  If I want students to use German all the time, too, I need my grading system to reflect that.  In German 1 and 2, grades are weighted at 75% for assessment (quizzes, tests, and projects) and 25% for assignments and participation.  I've decided that in German 4, grades will be 50% for assessment, 25% for assignments, and 25% for target language participation.

A little while ago, I found a Weekly Rubric for Target Language Use from Spanishmama.com which she created using materials from Joshua Cabral at World Language Classroom. 

I started with that and modified the format and rubric until I had what I think will work well for my classroom.

We have three 6 week grading periods per semester, so I made a place to record weekly scores for the semester.

Click here for an editable copy of my D4 Target Language Participation Rubric.