Der Wolf und die sieben Geisslein

A few years ago I stumbled upon an activity that connected the story "Der Wolf und die sieben Geisslein" with the perfect tense and past participles, available from deutschdrang.com  I've used this reading activity with my German 2 students once we've covered weak verbs, strong verbs, and verbs with sein as their helping verb.

There's about 60 verbs.  I divide students into four groups and have each group 12 of the verbs.  They're responsible for writing the past participle for their verbs.  Once students have had enough time to fill in their verbs, we read the story as a class.  Groups take turns reading out the sentences from their section.

I've found in the past that when we do this activity, students sometimes have trouble understanding what's going on.  There's pictures in the file, but they don't always help.  Previously I would act out or draw parts of the story to make it clearer.  For this year I decided to create images using Power Point and clipart - I have six different scenes from the story to help explain as we go along.

I think students this year had a much easier time understanding through both the text and the pictures.  What's great is that the Power Point slides can be printed out, mixed up and given to students.  Using the images, they can put the story in order and re-tell it in their own words (using brand new vocabulary and the perfect tense, of course!).  If you'd like the Power Point I used, just click here!

The story is a lot of fun, but we do a little bit extra once we've gone through the original version.  I find a Sesame Street version in German.  Burt and Ernie (note that they're Ernie und Burt in the German version...) re-tell the story, but this time it's der Wolf und die zwei Geißlein.  It's a cute version that's not as grim as the original.  Check it out:


I also have some activities we do with the video: vocabulary clues, content questions, and a venn diagramm.  If you're interested in the activities, click here.

I really love doing this activity with students.  It's different from just drilling past participles (borrrring) and it's something that's practical - telling a story!  Students enjoy the story and love watching the video.  Try it out and let me know if you like it as much as I do :)

If you'd like to do this activity but with the Imperfect Tense instead, here's another version of the story.  It isn't already edited for students to fill in verb forms and doesn't have the included vocabulary activities, but it could be fixed.

- 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