Falschparker

We're still in our car unit in German 3, focusing now on how to drive.  In addition to talking about traffic signs, speed limits and general rules of the road, today we talked about bad driving.

I stumbled upon a couple of resources provided by Deutsche Welle that fit into this mini-topic.

The first one was about der Idiotentest.  I asked students to come up with what they thought it would be, then we listened to the provided audio file and edited our definition.  I then asked students to come up with examples of bad driving that would force someone to have to take the Idiotentest.

We then moved on to bad parking via a video article from Deutsche Welle: Eine App gegen Falschparker.  We watched and discussed the video using the provided exercises.  Then I asked students if they thought parking was an issue at our school.  Our senior class has already left (they graduate tomorrow), so the general consensus was that parking has improved a lot recently but that it could be bad (we often have people parking in spots that are not actual spots).  I broke students into groups and challenged them to go into the school parking lot and find Falschparker.  And just like the app we just talked about, they would need to photograph the cars.

Obviously I didn't want to incriminate any drivers at our school - students, teachers or otherwise.  This was just an extension of what we were doing in class.  To make sure that the photos stayed anonymous, students were told not to show any license plates.  And to make this part fun, I designed these European-style fake license plates.

Fake license plates based on ones found from a quick Google search :)

Each group was given one of the license plates (today we had team Deutschland, Liectenstein and Belgien).  In each of their pictures, they had to display their license plate and not the actual one.  I then gave them 15 minutes to try and find as many as they could (we have three parking lots, each on a separate side of the school - the time was necessary just to allow them to walk between them).

When time was up, each group had to send me what they thought were the five most egregious parking mistakes along with a count of the total number of Falschparker they found.

Here are some of the photos:

If you plan on doing this (and I recommend it!) make sure you tell students to include enough of the car to show how bad the parking was - some of the student photos are close ups that basically just show you a car.  There was also one group (ahem, my group of boys) who decided to fabricate some bad parking jobs... by re-parking their own cars.  Props to them on the creativity and effort, though!

Also interesting to note: both of the girl groups found a lot of Falschparker, while the boys found fewer.  The girls were looking for lots of examples whereas the boys were looking for the most obvious examples (higher - or maybe lower? - standards for what it meant to be a Falschparker).

- Frau Leonard

Trabis, Trabis, Trabis!

In German 3 we have a unit that talks about cars - it's a well-timed unit, because students are usually juniors and are just starting to get their license.  In addition to all the usual car-related activities (identifying car parts, talking about car features, talking about how to drive/rules of the road, etc), we spend some time talking about Trabis.  

I start by having students do a little brainstorming.  I use this Power Point to see what they already know.  Depending on their level of familiarity, you can give them more or less background info.  This year, for example, my students had no clue what a Trabi was - even with the picture on screen they weren't comfortable making the guess that it was a car (senioritis a year early?).  

There are also some great videos out there that have Trabis.  Deutsche Welle has this one on YouTube that could be used as a follow-up to the brainstorming activity.  It's a little long, so you might just want to pick snippets to view as a class.

I also really like this one from the movie Toedliche Traeume: 

There's a lot you could do with this video.  Aside from just watching it and discussing what happens, you could stop it at various points and have students predict what will happen next.  

I recently read a blog post about inferring and how to use it to build critical thinking skills.  This seems like a good clip to use - without showing them the title of the video, ask them when and where it takes places, etc. and use what they see and hear in the video to justify their answer.

Deutsche Welle has a great Video-Thema that talks about the new Trabi design.  Like with all of their videos, it comes with a copy of the manuscript and some exercises to go along with the video.  

After that, students have to make an ad for the Trabi (either the old model or the new version).  At this point in the unit, we've already analyzed at German car ads and discussed what we think makes a good advertisement.  Their job is to make the best ad they can for the Trabi - one that really sells the product.  And the only way to do that is to give them a market... German 2 and 4.  Each class gets a chance to look at the finished ads and vote on which they think the best/most effective one is.  

Here are some of the ones from this year:

This is a great cultural tie-in for the car unit.  When students start looking for images of Trabis for their ads, they can't get enough of some of the weirder designs.  Usually we do a short DDR and Ostalgie unit after German 4 has taken the AP exam

And if we get a chance to talk about the DDR and Ostalgie in more detail (usually in German 4 after students have taken the AP exam), they already have a starting point.  When students watched Good Bye Lenin this year in German 4, they all immediately recognized the Trabi :)

- Frau Leonard