Word Order Bookmarks

As a lot of ideas start, I saw something on Pinterest. The original idea related to Long Division, but the idea of using bookmarks to help students keep track of steps seemed applicable to more than just math equations. Since my students have been struggling with word order lately, I saw a great application for it with my eighth graders.

I created these bookmarks to help students keep track of a basic German sentence and to help break down what "miscellaneous" sentence elements are (something that's come up more and more as we start talking about time expressions, direct objects, adjectives, and inverted word order).

I made these bookmarks using card stock, pipe cleaners, and beads. All in all it probably cost $15 for all the supplies, but I could easily make hundreds more than the class set I made and gave out. As students write their sentence, they slide the bead down the pipe cleaner to keep track of where they are in the sentence. The bead will show them what they need to add next, whether it’s a subject, direct object, specific verb type, etc. and eliminate the question of "Where does this go? What comes next?"

Although I made a class set and gave them out, I think in the future I would create perhaps 10-15 for a class and only hand them out for in class usage. This way students have it as a reference but I don't have to keep re-making them. I also plan on color coding them so that each type of word order (basic sentence vs question vs inverted word order, etc) are on a different color card stock.

I created a bunch of bookmarks featuring different types of word order that I can pull out as we get to different topics. If you're interested, they're available on my TPT store!

I also would recommend students use the back of the bookmarks for other details. For my students doing the basic present tense, the back is a great spot for writing a verb conjugation chart. For students using the modal verbs bookmarks, writing a list of the modal verbs and perhaps conjugating those as well would be a good extra reference. Other ideas: listing the subordinating conjunctions and their meanings, giving examples of TMP elements, and giving examples of weak and strong verbs.

- Frau Leonard

Stem-Changing Verb Posters

I bought a poster from Teacher's Discovery last year for the Hunger Games.  I love the books and movies, and I know my students are fans too, so it seemed like a cut poster to have in class.  Aside from having the German movie title, it also has three verbs conjugated in the present tense: gewinnen, leben, essen.  Overall, great poster that I've proudly had on display.

It took a year of this poster staring me in the face, though, for me to get a project idea.  I decided to have students come up with their own posters in the same style - picture, title and three verbs conjugated.

The first thing I had students do, before I even introduced the project, was answer the following questions:
* Was sind deine Lieblingsbücher?
* Was sind deine Lieblingsfernsehprogramme?
* Was sind deine Lieblingsfilme?
Students enjoyed sharing out their answers and comparing with classmates, and it was a great transition into the project.

Basically, for this project students had to create a "poster" for one of their favorite books, TV shows or movies.  Their poster had to have the name of the movie (bonus if they found the German version!), a picture from the movie AND three verbs related to the movie, fully conjugated.  Since we were working on Stem-Changing Verbs (and it is in the original poster, after all!), I required students to pick two regular verbs and one stem-changing verbs.

To give some variety, I had students pick different books, TV shows and movies - NO repeats within the class!  I then gave students time to work in the computer lab.  It was a good opportunity for students to use leo.org or beolingus to look up new verbs.

Obviously I had the poster hanging in my room as an example, but to further illustrate what I wanted students to be able to produce I made a few other examples:

Check out some of the projects students came up with!

  

  

 

Quick, in class project that was fun for students - they got some verb practice while getting to talk about their favorite movie.

- Frau Leonard

Zwerge sind zum Lernen

One of the grammar units covered in Deutsch Aktuell 2 is "Infinitives Used as Nouns."  It's a relatively useful topic, but it's not very difficult nor does it take very long to cover.  I usually use it as a starting point to talk about Infinitives with Zu and with Um... zu.  

A problem I was having, though, was that the text doesn't provide much practice for this topic.  There's maybe four short practice exercises total.  So last year, in attempt to give a more comprehensive look at this topic before moving on to the slightly more difficult one, I scoured the internet to see what other people do.  Luckily, I came across this activity.  

Basically, it's a cloze activity that goes along with the song "Steh auf, wenn du auf Zwerge stehst."  Instead of going through the entire set of lyrics, though, it only focuses on the parts that have infinitives.  The song is ridiculous and the video doesn't disappoint either.  If you're looking for an "answer key," you just have to look up the lyrics as a whole.

I like the song and activity, but I did end up adding to it a bit.  I found that some of the verbs were new to students, so I added a matching activity.  I then make students try to guess which verb goes where before we listen to the song and watch the video.  And at the end, I include a short sentence completion activity to get them using the structure on their own.  If you're interested in my version, click here.

There's another video of this song that's on YouTube - not as interesting, but it does include the lyrics.  Good as a self-check for students.



 - Frau Leonard

P.S.
Sadly, I couldn't back-track my steps well enough to find out where exactly I got the original activity from.  If you happen to know the original author or the site where it's found, let me know so I can credit them!

Color Coded Student Packets

I wasn't very good at planning during my first year of teaching.  I was a day by day kind of teacher, and aside from being highly stressful, meant I made a lot of copies each day.  Trust me, that sucked.

As I got more organized and collected a mass amount of material for each unit (see Three Levels of Planning), I found that I hated having to figure out which worksheets to hand out which days.  A few years ago I started doing packets for each unit.  Each packet contains all of the notes and activities that I plan on doing in that unit.  There's a title page so students know the topic, they're color coded, the page numbers are labeled... and best of all, I only have to make copies and hand out papers once a unit.

Overall, I found the kids responded well to the switch.  At first I think it scares them to be getting such a big packet, but as they realize that packet represents at least a week (maybe up to three) of work, they calm down.  For students who are more disorganized, I found this helps a lot.  Instead of lots of worksheets being spread throughout their binders, folders, backpacks, jacket pockets... or wherever else they mysteriously vanish, everything's in one place and there's only one thing to keep track of.

This is also great for when students are absent, especially for extended periods of time.  They have all of the work they'll be missing without you having to keep track of a bunch of different papers to give them.

I think I mentioned in my post on Three Levels of Planning that I keep my grammar and vocab units separate.  At any given time, each class is learning one new grammar topic while doing one new vocab unit- each gets a packet, and color coding helps students keep them apart.  I can say "Get out your grammar packet," or just "Get out the blue packet."

It also makes it clear when I give homework.  I specify the activity, the color of the packet, and the page number (make sure to put page numbers!).

I rotate between the four colors my school has available.  Currently we're using pink and blue in German 1 for the units we're covering.  Our next two units will be in yellow and green.  Once those are done, we'll switch back to pink and blue.  This makes it just that much easier to specify what students should be referring to at any given time.

Though I should add, I only do the cover pages and color coding for levels 1 and 2.  Levels 3 and 4 still get packets... there's just no cover pages and they're on plain white paper.

- Frau Leonard