March Madness - Verrueckter Maerz

It's March Madness time, and I'm bringing the idea into the German classroom with German music videos! I picked 16 music videos and put them in a bracket. Each day, two videos will go head to head and students will vote on which they think is better. By the end of the month, we'll have our winning video!

On the first day, I gave students the brackets and without any information besides the name of the songs, I asked them to fill out their bracket. Here are the videos we'll be looking at:

1. Marteria — Endboss : https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=225&v=AWcFHEdhYys
2. Wir sind Helden — Wenn es passiert : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpfvzVa4uyM
3. Alexander Marcus — Hawaii Toast Song : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHHAR1S_eKA
4. Die Fantastischen Vier — Geboren : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XGqXhMqitg
5. Schnappi — Schnappi das kleine Krokodil : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oe3FG4EOgyU
6. Xavier Naidoo — Bei meiner Seele : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhILcidWp1Q
7. Deine Freunde — Hausaufgaben : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w01harg0E7M
8. Silbermond — Das Beste : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyYAQHDMqfA
9. Die Prinzen — Millionaer : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezQs0sB8Q0s
10. Nena — 99 Luftballons : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La4Dcd1aUcE
11. die Atzen & Nena - Strobo Pop - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy-siseBfaE
12. Deichkind — So’ne Musik : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdIP3hyxi3k
13. Peter Fox — Alles neu : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdtLCfEcPL4
14. Die Drogen — Du bist die Sonne : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_vqjqIAyjM
15. Wise Guys — Schönen guten Morgen : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32M8qRGrUE8
16. Cro — Einmal um die Welt : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2pySXCmwpc   

It took some time to decide on these videos. Obviously I had to view them all to make sure they were school appropriate (a couple that I liked didn't make the final list since I am working with 8th graders on this). I looked for videos that were interesting, songs that were good, and/or songs that had a cultural impact. We'll see how this particular list goes and I might edit for next year.

Here's a look at the bulletin board bracket I'll be using to keep track of the rounds:

The plan is that the first time a video comes up in the bracket, we'll watch it in class. This does mean the first 8 days will be more time consuming since this will take up our opening of class. After they're familiar with the videos, I'll probably just show a brief clip to remind them what the video is. Students will vote on their favorite using PollEverywhere. For the first round, students will receive 1 point for correct guesses. For the second round, 2 points, third round 3 points, etc. I'll have a small prize for the winner(s).

This is an idea I got from one of the Spanish teacher sin my building and one that I've seen used by English teachers for books. Looking forward to seeing how it goes overall and what video wins out!

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