Frohe Weihnachten!

Every year on the last day of school before Winter Break, I take a break from the curriculum to do some Christmas-related activities with my German students.

This year we had the Adventkalender up throughout December, so I tied that in to some of our activities.  In German 1, I divide students into groups and sent them into the hallway to take notes on the information there.  We then came back and played a trivia game and watched Mickeys Weihnachtsgeschichte to finish up class.

With German 2-4, we actually go caroling through the school.  Each year we sing O Tannenbaum.  I ask the other teachers if they wouldn't mind our classes coming by to sing a quick Christmas carol during the day.  Each class had a list of ten or more other teachers to visit all around the school.

When we visit a class, a student introduces his/her class and the song they're about to sing.  This year, again because the Adventkalender has been up, I added something new - trivia questions!  After singing, we asked for two volunteers from the class.  Each volunteer got a different multiple choice question about German Christmas traditions.  If they got the question right, they got a candy cane :)

We spend December practicing the lyrics (usually once or twice a class if we have time).  To make things a little faster (since we have so many classes to visit), we usually only sing the first verse.  German 2 students have a bit of trouble the first time through, but by German 4 they all have it memorized and can't wait to sing!

I hope everyone is having a good winter break!

- Frau Leonard

Deutschklub: Pfefferkuchenhaus

This year we started a German Club.  It's been fun (and definitely interesting) going through the process of forming a club and holding events.

To celebrate the holidays, we put together and decorated ginger bread houses.  I got pre-made sets from Target and Harris Teeter.  They were really nice in that they had all the supplies - walls, frosting, candy decorations, all of it - but we did have a few problems with the ginger bread breaking.  One of the houses had a broken piece when they opened it and some of the other students accidentally broke some of their pieces during construction :(

The kids did have fun though (even with the broken pieces).  We put together the houses today and we're storing them in our office freezer over night - tomorrow I'll have other teachers judge them for stability, appearance and creativity.  If you're interested in the rating sheet we'll be using, just click here.

Loved this event - can't wait to see what else the German Club does this year and can't wait to do this event again next year :)

Check out how it went:



 - Frau leonard

Adventkalender: Bulletin Board Display

Christmas is almost here!  To help get my students in the spirit, I decided to create an advent calendar display for my classroom.  I dug around to come up with 25 facts about Christmas traditions in Germany, then numbered them and put them on construction paper.  Each day we turn over another day to learn another fact.

I actually ended up not putting this up in my classroom...  We were lucky enough to get the display case in the World Language hallway (which actually gets a lot of traffic).  It'll be up there all month (end of November to beginning of January) - a great way to advertise German in the school!

Overall I really like how it turned out...

Here's the full display... or as much of it as I could get to fit in the picture

Here's the Adventkalendar before we started flipping over the days

Here's the other half of the board, decorated with generic Christmas-y stuff :)

This was something I had hoped German National Honor Society and German Club could help put up... but the kids weren't available when I needed them (sigh) and didn't get a lot of it done on their own.  I ended up having my student aides put up a lot of the decorations (no big deal, that's what they're there for) and I needed to make a lot of them myself.  I made the "Weihnachten in Deutschland" letters, the Christmas tree and gifts.  At least if I save them and get them laminated, I can use them again next year.

On the half day before Thanksgiving break started, I had most of my German classes help out by making snowflakes.  They were surprisingly into it.  Turns out, the kids were initially pretty bad at making snowflakes (lots of squares, got some jack-o-lantern-like ones, very distorted/lopsided ones...).  I ended up using Paper Snowflakes to show them how to make them look... well, a little bit more like snowflakes.  It worked pretty well and as you can see, we made a lot of them.

If you're interested in this bulletin board set, it's available on TPT - just click here!

- Frau Leonard