German conjugation and body parts

The semester is half way through and the children have learned a lot! They're working on counting to twenty, know basic introductions and can talk about their name and where they're from. They've learned their colors and were able to understand a simple story about what happened to a bear who wandered across the border from Austria. They understand simple commands and we are continuing to work on speaking more and building on their very basic vocabulary.

This week, we took a close look at the English verb 'to come' and the German verb 'kommen.' Students looked closely at the conjugation of the German and were able to see the pattern for conjugating regular verbs in German. We filled them out in their charts. Just as a reminder, the blank charts in their notebooks are NOT homework. We will fill them out together in class. I looked for some videos on verb conjugation for a little review, but all of them are geared toward much older students and a lot of them are rather dry at that. In this episode of German in Three Minutes, Laura shares and important phrase (how to ask if someone speaks English) and she talks about the conjugation of the verb sprechen in the three forms it is used in the video.



Then we practiced words for body parts with a litte Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes (Foot, in German) and a game of Simon says. They colored their monsters according to the directions I gave them in German and did quite well! Here's Kermit der Frosch and Professor Hastig introducing the main body parts:


And Herr Antrim teaching body parts with his Mr. Potato Head doll. Listen carefully, he also introduces a few verbs associated with the parts (ears hear, eyes see, etc.)


And some activities to practice:

Body part tic tac toe.
Fire at the robot's body parts as they are called out.
This one is a little harder. It requires reading, which we have only practiced a little. If your child is ready for a challenge or you can read a litte German, have fun putting together different robots.

And finally, this week's Tro Tro. This week, Tro Tro washes up for breakfast. Listen as he mentions some of the body parts we learned in class!


Next week, we're going to take all we've learned so far this semester to write a small book about ourselves.

Bis dann!