Wiener Konditoreis: Authentic Reading

A colleague of mine several years ago had lived in Austria - during my first year teaching German, she gave me this old menu she happened to have.  It was from an Eiscafé in Vienna.  Nothing too fancy - just eight menu items in a small pamphlet style menu.

The great thing was that it went along perfectly with the Deutsch Aktuell, Kapitel 6B.  This unit adds to the earlier vocab list on food by giving different drinks and types of ice cream.  It's relatively easy to find online menus or pictures of menus, but here was a real one straight from Europe for students to see!

I made a bunch of color copies and laminated them to give it more of a menu-like feel (and makes it more durable - I made them six years ago and still use them each year).  It's authentic but more than comprehensible enough for German 1 students.  They love that they have something they can actually read all of!

If you'd like the full menu and questions I use, it's available on TPT - just click here!

- Frau Leonard

Embedded Reading: Der Briefträger kommt

Recently I've been looking into embedded reading as a way to increase student literacy in German.  After reading up on it a bit, I decided to modify a short reading I use at the beginning of German 2 as we transition into the school year.

The original story is called "Der Briefträger kommt."  I have no idea where it's from - another German teacher gave me a copy of it years ago.  Based on the copy I have, it's from "Deutsch macht Spass," but other than that I'm not sure of its origin.  It's a short reading that contained mostly dialogue.  It had a lot of vocabulary that was familiar to students, was in the present tense, and had verb exercises that went along with it, which was primarily why I used it at the beginning of German 2 as a review.

I took the original story and modified it.  I actually ended up creating the reading Top Down - I wrote the third, more detailed version first (based heavily on the original I had), then worked backwards to get the other two versions.  I also added pictures and changed the exercises that go along with the story.

Here's a look at how the stories differ in detail and length:

First reading: 112 words, 1 page

Second Reading: 220 words, 1 1/2 pages

Third Reading: 304 words, 2 pages

I came up with four activities to go along with the reading.  The first looks at comprehension, the second and third get the students to expand on the details of the story, and the fourth gets them to create their own version in comic form.

I had never thought this reading was very difficult for students, but the past few years they had found it very difficult to both understand and do the exercises.  I don't know if it's because we do it right after summer break or what, but I found that this year the students understood the story much better and were much more involved in the extension activities.  With the changes I've made, I feel I could use this later this year with my German 1 students with no problems.

If you're interested in this activity, it's available for free on my TPT account!  Let me know how it goes!

- Frau Leonard