I am not going to be able to teach my next lesson on Nikolaus to the 3rd & 4th graders. The classroom teachers kindly agreed to work on it with the students while I’m away. They will review the Nikolaus legend I told them in the last lesson, but I needed a way for the kids to hear the German story. So my terrific tech-savvy husband helped me figure out a way to do just that!

I used a program called Explain Everything and was able to use a tablet to draw and record the story as a video that could be uploaded! Here it is….

While this method follows the guidelines for Story Listening, it is not at all meant to be a replacement. It does use a variety of aspects of Comprehension-Aiding Supplementation (CAS):

• Drawings
• Written Words
• Synonyms
• Antonyms
• Word Families
• Students’ First Language
• Slow & Clear Speach

The main things that I am missing here are gestures (body movements) and mimic (facial expressions). However, I believe my tone of voice does also help slightly to make up for this lack.

Also, this story is already known to the students. Not only did I tell the story the week before my absence, but it is the 3rd year in a row that they have heard it! So I feel good about sending it in to help the students through this “substitute” lesson.

After they watch the video, students have two options:

1. Draw a picture of their favorite scene and find a sentence in the text to use as a caption.
2. Illustrate a booklet of the story (can also be done in partner work).

A variation for the second option would be to print out individual pages from the booklet and have each student illustrate one page to make a collaborative book.

You can download the text and illustration page as a PDF here: Nikolaus und die drei Töchter Text.  Download the booklet as a PDF here: Nikolaus booklet.

I hope to create more animated drawings like this for my students to use as review. In a pinch, they could also be used as a substitute lesson if I am absent at the last-minute. Stay tuned!