Cultural Maker Spaces

I was planning out some blog posts on a couple end of year units I do with my seventh graders. They're awesome units (imho) that the students really enjoy and that I look forward to all year... but as I started writing those blog entries for our Cultural Maker Spaces program, I realized... I never explained what this unique program is that we run in our Middle School Exploratory program.

I actually presented this program at the 2023 Fall MFLA conference - you can view the presentation here. It links some activities we do in our German, Latin, and Spanish Maker Space units :)

What is Cultural Maker Spaces? 

Think of Maker Spaces that you've seen in your school or district: a place for students to collaborate, to build things, to explore and investigate real world problems. That's what we do, but with a focus on tying in language and culture. Students are given an issue that relates heavily to the target culture, learn more about that topic along with new vocabulary, and then at the end they show their knowledge by designing and creating... something. That something depends on the specific project we do.

What are the units?

We have time for two projects!

All three languages do one identical project: water. We each take a different spin on it - for French, they look at access to water in French-speaking African countries, for Spanish they look at Mexico City and how it's sinking, for German it's about Umweltschutz - but we all look at water usage and conservation. We explore our own water consumption and access, making comparisons to the people in the TL culture. At the end, we investigate household and natural items that could be used to filter water collected from rivers, lakes, etc. Students 

For our second project, we all do something different that's focused more on that language. I can't speak to what the French or Spanish classes do, but I do something crazy - I do a Latin project :) It helps expose the students to another language during their exploratory year, 

How are the units structured? 

Phase One: General Intro. We learn vocabulary and do a general look at the culture. For example, in the water unit we learn about bodies of water in German-speaking countries and start our vocab list. anchoring it within a familiar framework"

Phase Two: The Issue. We look into the cultural/historical aspects for the specific issue the project is based around. For Latin, we look at the Roman Military. contextualizing the unit

Phase Three: Construction. Students learn specifics about the final project. We incorporate necessary STEAM skills (sometimes this is engineering principals, math knowledge, etc).

Why do we do Maker Spaces?

I currently work at a district that runs an Exploratory Language program in 7th grade. Students rotate through three languages - currently French, Spanish, and Latin - so they can get a taste for the language and culture before deciding which language they would like to continue in 8th grade. It's a great program for a lot of reasons I won't get into, but we were having an issue a few years ago. 

Three rotations means dividing the year into three, which is messy for a school year already divided into quarters. Because of the timing, students would typically only get to sample two of the three languages before deciding on their schedules for the next year. That meant that third language, whichever it was, never got a fair chance. Students were unengaged when they arrived at that third language because they'd already picked something else. They were mentally checked out, at a time of year that's already challenging to keep seventh graders focused. 

So the World Language Department came up with a plan: we would do four rotations to align with the four quarters. The first three rotations would be their usual Exploratory program - intro to each of the three languages - but in the fourth one, we would do Maker Spaces. This way students would still get to sample all three languages (with the added benefit of doing so BEFORE scheduling), and then during that end of the year stage where students get squirrely, we'd have fun, engaging projects to dive deeper into language and culture. And voila! Cultural Maker Spaces was born :)

Cultural Maker Spaces: Medien in Deutschland

This year our department got the opportunity to revise our 7th Grade Flex curriculum. Instead of doing three 12 week rotations, we transitioned to four 9 week rotations. That means every students gets all three languages. (French, German, Spanish)... BUT we still had 9 weeks leftover at the end of the year to fill.

We decided to create three projects per language on the theme of Cultural Maker Spaces, one of them focusing on Media so that we could use our school's green screen and video/audio gear. While that didn't exactly pan out, we were still able to implement the project via distance learning and have students create some awesome projects while expanding their German vocab and cultural awareness.

Part One: Media Investigation
We started the project with a general look at media in German-speaking countries. I collected different examples of media - weather forecasts, news reports, gameshows, cooking shows, interviews, etc - for students to investigate. Here's the Padlet of the resources I collected for students!

They completed a Media Investigation Sheet to show what types of media they chose to look at, any major differences/similarities between German and American media, and they selected the topic they planned on pursuing for the rest of the project.

Part Two: Choice Board & Planning
Students now considered different media-related topics and decided which one they officially wanted to do for their project. They received a choice board with a variety of examples and decided on one that worked best for them.

Based on student confusion and questions that came up during our distance learning, I've added an additional part of this phase that I'll include next year. They'll at this point decide on their group members (3-5), their topic, AND what they think their final product might look like. I created this simple planning guide to help them make some of these decisions now so they could focus on that while moving forward.

(If you like this template, please check it out at SlidesMania and take a look at their other templates - they're really awesome and a great way to visually improve any activity!)

Part Three: Vocab Planning
We invested a lot of time in this next phase of the project. They know their topic and what they plan to create, and now they have to build their vocabulary to get them there. I had them brainstorm 15 new German words related to their topic that they thought would be useful. I also recommended they break those 15 words down into 5 nouns, 5 verbs, and 5 adjectives to make sure they'd have the right building blocks to create complete sentences and the type of descriptive details they'd need.

I also tried out a Jamboard to have students work together and help other classes brainstorm vocabulary for the same project topic. Unfortunately we had some issues with the actual Jamboard (we couldn't get the access working for students to add comments), so I had to the same idea but with Google Slides.

Here's a blank copy of the Slide Show. Each topic had its own slide and I tried to post some some images, links, and/or vocabulary phrases to help get them started. Students could post comments with additional resources and vocabulary they found to help support their classmates.

Part Four: Sentence Building
In previous units, we had worked on vocabulary but not a whole lot on the sentence building aspect. They had new words but what were they going to do with them? How were they going to tie it all together?

We did a NearPod lesson where we talked about creating basic sentences - the word order we'd use, the parts of speech we'd need (in direct relation to our vocab planner!), the verb endings, etc - and then practiced with familiar vocabulary. I did NOT do this (though I wish I had!) this time, but I also put in an activity where students write their 15 words on slips of paper and arrange those papers into sentences. This gives them a good visual on how to put things together, to double check that they're using all their words, and blank slips of paper give them the flexibility to add new words they discover they need!

Part Five: Project Time!
Students now had the tools they needed to create projects on their own or in groups. Because we were doing this via distance learning, I had check-ins every other day where students updated me on their progress and asked questions as needed. You can see some examples of student work on this Padlet!

When students submitted their final project, they also had to rate themselves in this rubric. They rated themselves in the Self-Evaluation portion and then I viewed their products and graded them in the Teacher Evaluation. Our scores combined to give them their final grade.

If we were in school doing this as a group project, there would have been a teamwork component to their grade or a separate rubric where they rated their team members. Since 95% of my students did NOT work with a partner, I didn't develop that rubric/rating sheet.

Step Six: Reflection
Their last piece was a Reflection where they considered what they learned and how they did with the project, as well as offering suggestions to me on how to improve it for future classes.

I wish I incorporated more reflection after projects and assessments in general, so it was a top priority to include it for this one! We've spent about four weeks working through the various steps, and it seems a fitting transition to consider their work on this unit before moving onto our next and final one this week.

Please note: I did not create the rubric or reflections from scratch. Our department head found them earlier this school year and I've since modified them for this project. If you know where they were posted please let me know so I can link back to the original!

How do you incorporate projects and student choice into your units? How often do you use choice boards for projects?

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week! ❤️ Hope everyone's having a good end to this chaotic school year!

- Frau Leonard

Maerchen und die Gebrueder Grimm

This year I'm working with seventh graders in a German Exploration class. The purpose of the class is to introduce students to German language and culture over 12 weeks, but in a way that's fun as much as it is informative. Throughout the year, I've tried to bring in culture through holidays and holiday-related crafts, but with my last group of seventh graders, I decided to bring in some history and literature as well!

We did a whole two week unit on fairy tales, looking at the Brothers Grimm and some of their more well known stories. Students learned about the brothers, the main fairy tale tropes, and then read some stories as a class to analyze. After they got a handle on what "traditional" fairy tales looked like without the Disney sugarcoating they're used to, students broke into groups to pick a German fairy tale to read, analyze, and then share with the class.

Students had fun and were generally scandalized/enraptured by the original versions of the stories. Some kids were already familiar with them, but for the most part there was something new for them in whatever story they happened to pick. I really had to emphasize with them to read the story I gave them though and not rely on their Disney knowledge (unfortunately some groups did not heed this advice...).

They also produced some great art! Check out these character charts they made for the good guys/bad guys in their stories:

Oh wow I have an Instagram!

I made a huge castle in the hallway outside our room - great way to show off student work and draw some attention ;)

In addition to the fairy tale charts, students made comics that summarized their fairy tales so they could share them with other groups.

If you'd like to purchase the full unit to use with your students, please check it out on TpT!

- Frau Leonard

Eine Modenschau: End of Year Fashion Show

It's probably pretty standard to have a "fashion show" project when doing a unit on clothes.  When I took French in Middle School, we put on a big one in the main atrium of the school.  There were probably a hundred students who came to view our fashion show (I assume the other language classes since I don't really remember) and we spent a lot of time on it.  To this day it's the only project that stands out when I think about my French classes throughout Middle and High School and even College.  

Prior to this year, I'd never done this project with my students.  I've thought about it before, we'd done similar "fashion show" activities that involved designing outfits but never an actual fashion show where the students dressed up.  For whatever reason, I decided this year would be the year to try it out.  

My German 1 class this past school year was a little on the weaker side and because we only saw each other every other day, I'd had to cut out a lot of activities I usually do simply due to time constraints.  I wanted to give them something fun at the end of the year to reward them for their progress (although weak as a class, they made some big improvements toward the end of the year).  

I wasn't sure how it would go.  When my French class did this project, we were a group of mostly girls.  With my German classes, they tend to be mostly guys.  In the lower level the genders are a little more even, but I was still worried the male students wouldn't find this project appealing.  I was pleasantly surprised how into this they got.  Even students who had had a lackluster performance all year were interested in the project.  When I did my usual end of the year survey to get feedback, most of the class was very positive about the project and wished they'd done more, similar projects.

We planned and carried this project out over four 90 minute class periods.  However, we never spent a whole class period on the project, so I think it could be done over the course of a week (5-6 days) with a shorter class period.  Here's the overall process:

Day One: Planning
I introduced the project to my students.  We were already in our clothing unit and had learned how to express like/dislike using the verb gefallen.  Before talking about the project itself, we looked at some pictures from fashion shoes.  We discussed what the models were wearing and if we liked the outfits.  This was a great segue into them doing their own fashion show.  I only gave them a general overview of the project at this point - that they'd be working in groups and each group would put on an actual fashion show during class.  More details would come as we went through the project.

I let students form their own groups of 4-5.  I did have to move a couple students around just to make sure the numbers worked out.  For this first day of planning, students had to do the basics for setting up the fashion show: who was emcee, who were the models, what was each model wearing?  There were some vocabulary requirements (needed twelve different articles of clothing, needed to look up new clothing-related words that weren't on our vocab list, etc) to help guide them, but really the sky was the limit.  I did, however, say that they should focus on clothing they already have at home - this was not an excuse to go shopping, this did not require new clothes or anything like that.  I emphasized that they should work with what they have.  

Day One Planning Sheet

As groups worked, I circulated to give them feedback.  The planning sheet helped keep them focused and listed all of the requirements for this stage of the project, but they still needed some guidance.  

At the end of class I collected the planning sheet from each group.  Since there are vocab and outfit requirements, I went through and made sure each group met them.  If they didn't, I highlighted areas for them to work on or finish.  


Day Two: Planning
Students get back their planning sheet from day one and get an opportunity to make any changes they need to.  Groups then moved on to the next planning sheet.

Day Two Planning Sheet

The next phase of planning is writing their script.  Although the emcee will be the person reading out the script during the fashion show, the entire group needs to work together to prepare it.  Students need to figure out the order for the fashion show (who's first) and write a short blurb about each outfit.  From the previous day, they already know what each student is wearing - that's the first part of the description.  The next step is to add detail.  I ask them to describe the colors and to use an adjective to describe each person's overall look (modisch, elegant, etc. - a list is included on the back of the planning sheet).  

They also need to think about the details that could really set their presentation apart from the other groups.  I told them to think about choreography (are there any waves or dance moves involved?) and music.  If they planned on having music as part of their fashion show (something I made completely optional), they needed to provide both the music and the speakers/method of playing it.  I also required them to submit the songs to me first so I could make sure they were appropriate.

At the end of class, I collected both planning sheets.  I made sure necessary changes were made to the day one sheet (if necessary) and went over the day two planning sheet.  I didn't make substantial changes - just spelling and gave help regarding more difficult grammar concepts.  If they made mistakes with concepts we already knew, I would highlight it instead of correcting it.  


Day Three: Practice Run
Students first had time to go over their planning sheets from the previous two class periods.  If they had questions or needed changes, this was the time to do it.  

I then gave students time to do practice runs of their entire fashion show.  The actual fashion show was going to be in the school atrium, so this was the first time students went to this space.  I explained where the audience would be sitting, where they would be starting from, where the emcee would stand, etc.  It was their job to figure out any choreography they planned on doing and to go through the entire script and performance, just to make sure everyone new what they were supposed to be doing.  It was a large enough space that two groups could use the stairs at the same time, while other groups planned.

Note: Although we did a practice run, I would maybe suggest giving more practice time.  

At the end of class, I re-collected the planning sheets (to make sure they didn't lose anything!).  The whole time you should be emphasizing the final date of the fashion show - do a final reminder that they MUST have their planned outfits NEXT CLASS!


Day Four: Fashion Show!I gave groups a few minutes to prep.  Some students needed to go change and the emcees needed time to go over the script.  I didn't make them memorize it - it didn't seem fair to have one group member do so much more work than the others during the actual fashion show.

I let groups volunteer to go first.  Emcees were given a toy microphone prop I have, just to make it a little more "authentic."  While other groups were presenting, the other students had a peer rating sheet to fill out.  It basically just asked for their opinion of the other groups - were they creative, which outfit was best, etc.  

Here's how it turned out:



Although I liked the idea of using the school atrium as the location for the project (a big space to make the project seem just as big), logistically it didn't work out as well as I wanted.  The space made it too hard to hear what the presenters were saying.  Next year I'll probably find a different space - a hallway, re-arrange my classroom, or maybe the auditorium if it's free.

The kids really did have a lot of fun - it makes me want to incorporate more group projects like this next year!

If you're interested in the worksheets I used, they're available for free on TPT - just click here!

- Frau Leonard

Berliner Sehenswürdigkeiten: Building Project

Each year in German 2 there's a unit on different parts of the city and giving directions.  Usually during this unit, I take a short break from the words like "Schloss" and "Bibliothek" to give them a tour of an actual city - Berlin.  We learn about different monuments within Berlin, a little bit about both the history and geography of Germany's capital.  It's a short cultural unit that ties in well with what we're doing grammar and vocab-wise.

German 2 was set to finish up the curriculum a bit early this year, so I came up with a project to take this unit a little farther and incorporate our friends in the Tech and Math Department.  I paired up with one of the other teachers and we designed a building project.  Students would work in groups of 3 to build scale models of different Berlin monuments.  I would cover all the history and geographical elements, and he would cover the math and building parts of the project.

After we had covered our usual Berlin unit, I had students form groups of 3.  This happened to work out perfectly because of our numbers, but now that I've done the project I think groups of 3 are ideal.  Groups of 2 would be too small (not enough people to help with the overall project), but groups of 4 would be too large (much more likely to have a group member who's doing nothing at any given time).

Once groups were formed, they got to pick their monument.  Here are the choices students got to pick from:

• Funkturm
• Schloss Charlottenburg
• Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche
• Kongresshalle
• Philharmonie
• Reichstaggebäude
• Brandenburger Tor
• Berliner Dom
• Fernsehturm
• Rotes Rathaus

Groups then had time to research their building.  Each group had to find out the following information:

1. Photos: Front view, side view, rear view, and top view of their building.  A quick search will help with some of this, but a lot of groups ended up using Google Maps for some of the other views.
2. Dimensions: Height, width and length of the building.  This will include multiple dimensions for more complex buildings.  More accurate dimensions are better as they move onto coming up with a scaled down version.  If you're not comfortable with the math, this is a great opportunity to work with the math department.  
3. List of Materials: Taking into consideration the texture and color of their building, students came up with a wish list of materials.  This would include things like balsa wood, Styrofoam cones, or spray paint.  This list doesn't guarantee that students will get these materials - it just helps give students a starting point before working.  They might need to change this list depending on the availability of materials in the shop, or if they find out a material's not working out the way they thought it would.
4. History: As an extension, students should look into the history of the building and find two interesting facts.

At this point, this is where my colleague took over.  We spent a few days a week in the shop, alternating between this project and the last vocab and grammar unit we were covering.  I would have to look into how many days students actually spent on construction, but it was probably around 10.  I think it could be done in less - I wasn't sure how much time to give students and I think they were a little slow getting started.  Next time we do this project, I would have specific deadlines every other day to keep students on track.

After the projects were done - this included construction, painting and for one group adding landscape - the buildings were brought to my room for display.  They look great (just check out the slideshow below).  German 2 students loved showing off their work and the other classes were very impressed.

The question of how to grade this was something I struggled a bit with.  Since students spent a lot of time on it, I wanted to make it worth a regular project grade.  But since construction isn't actually part of our German curriculum, I didn't want to punish students for not having skills that we don't really focus on.  I decided not to give any group below a C (again, their building capabilities aren't something I'm testing for).  If groups finished their entire building (all major parts - no missing domes or columns), they got a mid- to high-B.  For groups that didn't finish, I looked at how much effort they spent during our days in the shop.  If a group was more prone to slacking off or didn't seek as much assistance from the shop teachers, they didn't score as highly.  For groups that not only finished the building but were able to paint and add other details, they earned an A.  I'll probably work with the math and shop teachers to come up with a more detailed rubric for the next time we work on this project, but since this was so new I wasn't sure how to proceed this year.



Like the Rad von Glück game, this project is based on a presentation I attended at the Fall 2013 MFLA conference.  Somewhere I have my notes on the names of the presenters - I'll be sure to update this entry with that information once the school year has ended and I get time to sort through all my stuff!

**Edit**
I found my notes from this conference, but unfortunately the hand out does not have a name for me to credit.  I do know that it was from a presentation called "World Language Culture and STEM: Grow great culture lessons with STEM!"

- Frau Leonard

Der Lehrling: Marketing Internship for German 3/4

In German 3 or 4, we do a unit on professions.  It starts basically how you'd expect such a unit to start - we learn German words for various professions (der Lehrer, der Arzt, der Richter, etc.) and do various activities describing/grouping these professions.

As we move through the unit, however, we get into what I like to think of as more practical applications of the vocabulary and themes.

This part of the unit, called "Der Lehrling," is based largely on the free unit provided by College Board.  I first did these activities three years ago, had success (and my students had fun doing it), so we did it again this year.

The overall premise is that students are given an "internship" at a local marketing company that wants to produce a new soft drink.  During their internship, they will study marketing (video and print ads), create a new soft drink, and then create a marketing campaign to promote their drink.

The unit provided by College Board has most of what you would need to do this unit, including rubrics and a student packet.  I would highly recommend taking a look at it.  I only want to talk in detail about some aspects of the unit as a means of facilitating teachers who want to try this out for the first time.

Tips and Suggestions:

• I break students into groups of 3-5 (depends on class size).  These groups will be working together throughout the entire project.
• Before I even introduce the idea of creating a new soda, the first part of the "internship" consists of studying ads.  It's important that students become aware of the way people respond to different print and video ads - it'll definitely help them plan out their own versions later on.
  
  As homework the night before, ask students to bring in two ads from magazines.  It doesn't matter what the product is at this point.  With their groups, students complete this worksheet for the ads that they brought in.  Go through some of the ads together (or analyze some German ones you might have).
  
  I also like to include commercials.  I usually pick a couple for us to watch and analyze as a class.  I recommend finding German commercials (via YouTube) for products like Fanta, Pepsi, Coke and Red Bull.  (I usually do drink specific commercial ads as a transition into the rest of the project.)
  
  There's also a great activity available on TES for the 10 Worst German TV adverts.  Students can now see what does and doesn't work.
• When students make the "new sodas," they're basically mixing current sodas together in different amounts to get a new flavor.  I briefly explain what they'll be doing and ask students to sign up to bring different sodas.  I recommend that every member of a group bring in something different, but that they should also consult with other groups to try and get a larger variety.  Tell students at least a few days in advance of when they'll start mixing - students forget to bring in the soda!
  
  On your end, there are some materials you'll want to have handy when they actually start mixing: paper towels (one roll per group); funnels; lots of plastic cups (for mixing samples and tasting); plastic spoons; food coloring (just for fun).  If you have a smaller class, you might also want to bring in an extra soda or two (try to bring in something weird that no one else would have thought of - I brought in this pineapple flavored soda I found).
  
  Students will probably need a whole class period to mix and try different combinations.  Warn them to make small samples of each drink - they don't want to waste all their soda on a combination that tastes horrible.  They'll also need an empty container to put their "final" drink in.  Usually it works out that they've used up enough of one of the drinks they brought in that they can dump out the rest and use the freshly emptied container. 

• Students will need at least a couple of days to make the labels for their drinks as well as the ads.  Warn students that the ads should in some way demonstrate what we talked about when analyzing ads earlier.
• Once students have turned in the ads, I like to show them to the other German classes.  Each class gets to sample the sodas (this is entirely voluntary - some students might shy away from blue soda), and then judge the product on taste, the label on how it looks, and the ads on how persuasive they are.

After this part of our "professions" unit, we move on to analyzing German resumes.  Ultimately the unit ends in them writing their own Lebenslauf and having a job interview with me - and on their Lebenslauf, they need to include what they did during this "internship" and answer any questions about it that come up in the interview :)

- 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

Sport für alle!

This year when Deutsch II was learning sport-related vocabulary, I decided to work with our Physical Education Department at Glenelg to give the students a day to play a sport of their choosing.  I got them the gym for a whole period on a Friday - they chose a game and we took it from there.

First I started with some Piggeldy und Frederick.  We watched the video on Schlittschuh laufen in which Frederick has to explain skating to Piggeldy.


After viewing and discussing this video, I divided the students into groups and assigned each group one of the following sports: Basketball, Fußball, Hockey, Volleyball, Baseball, Tennis, amerikanischer Fußball.  Each group needed to come up with a German explanation of the game for Piggeldy.  They had to find the vocabulary to describe things like how many players were on a team, different positions (ex: goalie) and equipment (tennis racket), and the different rules/actions involved ("don't touch the soccer ball with your hands" and "kick the ball").  Then each group reported out what they had come up with.

At this point, I revealed that they were going to get a chance to play ONE of these sports during class.  They had to pick which sport, though, based on how easy they thought it would be to get the materials necessary and if they could get a big enough team.  After some voting and finagling, they agreed on Fußball.

The next step was I gave them the option of "inviting" (read that as "challenging") Deutsch III and Deutsch IV to the match.  They whole-heartedly wanted to challenge the upper levels.

Of course, it's one thing to have your own class go to the gym and play a game during the period that they have you.  It's another thing to pull students from other classes for a game.  I told the upper level German classes about the match and gave them a permission slip.  It was really more of a way to let the other teachers know what was going on.

A lot of students wanted to participate but most couldn't get out of class that day (we had had several snow days in a row which undoubtedly had something to do with it).  It was definitely fun to get a few new faces.  I hope to be able to do this game again in the future - I want it to be something that builds up and the kids look forward to playing as a team against another class.

As an alternate activity for students who, for whatever reason, didn't want to play, I gave them the chance to take pictures of the game instead.  This is German, not Gym, after all and I didn't want to force the kids to play - it's supposed to be fun!

The game itself went well.  The Phys Ed teachers were super supportive - they gave us pinnies and equipment and (most importantly!) the space to play in.  I think next year, though, I would invite another teacher to help moderate the game.  The kids were well behaved, the issue was more that I'm not personally very familiar with the rules and game play of soccer.  I'm a hockey and football girl, so when we play a game I don't know as well I feel I should ask one of the school coaches if they'd be willing to ref for us.

Now as fun as it was to take a day off and play a game, there's no way we stopped there!  The kids had, after all, spent all that time looking up soccer-related terms and we had all these pictures.  There was a project to be had out of this!

One of our media specialists had talked to me earlier in the year about Animoto, a website that makes you put together videos from your own photos or video footage.  You can get a free account, which does limit you to 30 seconds of footage and you don't have as wide of a selection in animations, music, etc, but the length was actually perfect for what we needed.  Check out one of the student videos!

Sporttag was a lot of fun and I can't wait to do it again next year!

- Frau Leonard

School Superlatives: A Project

I talked a little while ago about class superlatives - an activity I do with students as we learn the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives.  I actually tried a new project this year that sort of spring boards off this activity... we did school superlatives!

This is another great idea that I can't take credit for - like the Stammtisch for AP, this was a project inspired by another teacher within my county who did something very similar with her students.  It seemed like a lot of fun, so we gave it a try this year.

Students worked in groups to come up with 20 questions with the idea of school superlatives in mind.  To give you an idea of the questions they came up with, here are a few:
- Wer hat das beste Auto? / Who has the best car?
- Wer ist am schnellsten? / Who's the fastest?
- Wer ist am größten? / Who's the tallest?
- Wer hat die besten Haare? / Who has the best hair?
- Wer hat die besten Augen? / Who has the best eyes?
- Wer ist am klügsten? / Who's the smartest?

The idea was that they would then interview other students to find out the answers to these questions - Who is the fastest in the school?  Who does have the best eyes?

To find out the answers, though, I had students from this German 3 class visit my other German classes.  That's right, German 3 came to visit German 1, 2 and 4.  I love activities where students get to interact with other levels.  It's good for them to see that other people besides their classmates are learning German and they get to see what other classes are up to.  For lower levels, it's fun to get a glimpse into the future at how well they'll be able to speak later.  For upper levels, it's somewhat nostalgic to look back at previous projects.

When they came to talk to German 1 and 2, they were obviously talking to students who hadn't formally learned the comparative or superlative yet and who may not have even learned some of the adjectives or nouns they were learning (for example: athletic and eyes haven't come up for German 1 yet).  I warned German 3 about this ahead of time - they might need props to explain some of these words and to get the answers they wanted.  Because of course no English was allowed during these visits!

After compiling all their data, students had to create a Power Point highlighting six of their twenty winners.  They needed one slide per winner, making sure to include the person's name, a picture of them, and a sentence in German explaining what they won.

I gave them time in class not only to put together their Power Points, but also to visit other classes to find these students and get their pictures.

I also talked to our media specialists about getting these Power Points either in our morning announcements or on our daily scrolling announcements.  They were super supportive and helped out - my students got to see their projects all around the school :)

Pros and Cons:
- Pro: This project involved the whole school - all German classes participated and students had to talk to other classes to get even more data to pull from.
- Pro: The scrolling announcements have German in them now - great way to broadcast the language!
- Con: This can be tricky - students have to get permission to leave other classes in order to visit other German classes AND they needed to visit other classes to get the pictures they needed.
- Con: I fell into the trap of giving the students too much time to do this project.  They wasted a lot of that time because I wasn't sure of the deadlines (since it was my first time doing the project) and we got somewhat behind.  Next year this should be easy to fix though.

I will definitely be doing this project again next year.  It ended up being a lot of fun and is a practical use of the superlative.  I would also do this project with my French and Latin students... I'll just have to wait until the next time it works out that I teach the comparative/superlative in those languages!

All the rubrics and handouts I used for this project are available on TPT - just click here if you're interested!

- Frau Leonard