Carousel Review

One of the Spanish teachers in my building told me about this activity and it seemed like the perfect way to start out the year in German 1! I structured it as a review of the material we'd covered last year in 7th grade Flex.

Process… 

1. Choose the topics that you want students to brainstorm. Our beginning of the year review included the topics: Germany (geography, history, culture, etc), Greetings/Farewells, Alphabet/Pronunciation, Numbers, Calendar, Cognates/False Friends/Loan Words, Survival Vocab/Polite Expressions, Holidays
2. Write each topic at the top of a piece of paper.
3. Split students into groups of 3-5.
4. Make sure each group has a writing utensil. I use different color markers for each group so it's easy to identify who contributed what.
5. Give one topic to each group. I put my papers around the room on the wall and sent each group to a different topic. They rotated around to all the stations, like a carousel.
6. When you say "Go!" each group has 2 minutes to write as many things as they can about that topic. This could be vocab words/phrases, cultural info, facts/trivia, whatever they remember.
7. After 2 minutes time is up, they rotate to the next topic.
8. Groups can make additions OR corrections to what previous groups said.
9. Repeat until all groups have gotten to all topics.
10. Review their answers at the end as a class, making corrections and additions as necessary.

This is a good way to see what the class as a whole remembers or what they might need to work on. I was not terribly surprised to see they remembered numbers really well or that they need to review spelling, but I was shocked they remembered so little of the holiday topics we'd talked about! 

I also asked students a few follow up questions as an exit ticket...

1. What topic(s) do you remember the best from last year?

2. What topic(s) do you remember the least?

3. Was the review in class helpful? Why/why not?

Overall students said they liked the activity because it helped show them they do actually remember more than they think. A few students weren't happy about their groups when they rotated and some pointed out there were errors (like saying Poland spoke German but Switzerland didn't), which is definitely why the review at the end as a class is essential to clarify those big errors.

- Frau Leonard