Monthly Archives: January 2020

SL: Klingelingeling – Take 3!

Posted in 1st - 4th Grade, Books, Story Listening, Uncategorized by

If you’ve read my posts from last year and the year before, you know that I LOVE this story! I love reading the book to my pre-k/kindergartners. And I love telling it to ALL my students as a Story Listening lesson 🙂

Upper Elementary:

Even though my 4th-graders have heard the story for the past two years, I thought it would be a great one to tell after winter break. The kids came back for just two days, and so I was in teaching German on Friday, January 3rd!

I decided to update it for the 4th-graders and added a few details and an extra paragraph. But for the 3rd-graders, I stuck to my original story. You can see the two boards here:

 

2020-01-03 13.33.21 4th

4th Grade

2020-01-03 12.51.23 3rd

3rd Grade

So in 4th grade, the Schlitten was blue. And after crossing the fields, they went carefully through a forest (because really, what story of mine would be complete without mentioning a Wald?!)

In the top picture, you can also see that I was using the expressions that were created by my friend over at We Love Deutsch. The kids LOVE to say the phrases! I try to include a few in each story for them to use. Sometimes they are in the text of the story, and they repeat them. But sometimes I think about how you might react and make a little speech bubble in the margin of my prompter. Then I point to the expression, and they all say it. Now they often don’t even need any prompting!

Since it is a short story, I needed something to do to finish out our 30 minutes. So I taught them the song “Mein Hut, der hat drei Ecken.” See this post to read all about it!

Lower Elementary:

On the following Tuesday I had my first meeting with my 1st & 2nd graders. Again I told them Klingelingeling.

The 2nd-graders remembered it from last year and still enjoyed it. They get really excited by a familiar story.

The 1st-graders are new to Story Listening this year. However, most of them were here in kindergarten last year, and many of them were in pre-school before that. And so they have heard me read the book a number of times! They were also very excited to know the story!

I did not take pictures of my story boards in 1st & 2nd grade, but they were similar to the 3rd-grade board. However, I often do not write as many words for them.

I am working on creating video reviews of my stories. Stay tuned for the Klingelingeling video….

Baby Hai

Posted in Pre-K & K Class, Songs, Uncategorized by

As my own kids are a bit older now, I don’t always hear about what is popular with the younger children. But at their last piano recital, a little girl played “Baby Shark” on the piano and sang along. At first, I thought, “What is this?!!” But it was actually really cute.

I was recently talking with another language teacher who said she was using it in her Spanish class. So now that’s got me thinking. In the fall we regularly sang “Fünf kleine Fische” in the pre-k/kindergarten classes. I think “Baby Hai” would have been a great follow-up song. Maybe we will circle back to the fish song and introduce “Baby Hai” along with a book about family.

Meanwhile, here is a link to a video of “Baby Hai” in German:

 

My New Favorite Song for German Class!

Posted in 1st - 4th Grade, Songs, Uncategorized by

Last fall I wrote two posts about the song “Mein Hut, der hat drei Ecken” – this one and this one. It went really well with my after-school German club!

Well, today I did it in class with my 3rd and 4th graders. It was SUCH a hit!!! Even the kids who were kind of tuning out and not engaging suddenly perked up 🙂

It worked really well to teach the song step by step. As we went along, they got more and more into it. And there were more and more giggles – while still maintaining order in the classroom 😉

STEP 1: Introduce the 5 vocabulary words that you end up leaving out in the song:

STEP 2: Teach the first two lines by just saying the words and doing the actions that go with them. You can watch a video of how to do the actions here: (but don’t start singing yet!!)

STEP 3: Then practice the next two lines with the actions. And put all 4 lines together.

STEP 4: Now sing the whole song, using the actions. You can use my poster with the words, if it helps. But I kind of liked waiting to add that visual. With the singing and the actions, there is already enough for the kids to focus on!

Mein Hut Songtext-page-002

STEP 5: Continue singing as you practice leaving out one new word each time you sing it. The posters I made really come in handy here!

STEP 6: Finally, turn on the music from the song above. (It’s on YouTube, of course, but I played it from my phone using the Amazon music app. I expect you could find it on any music app.) And have fun trying to keep up as you leave out more and more of the words while doing the actions. And ENJOY THE GIGGLES! (Hmm, maybe I should have taught them the word kichern?!)

Download all the posters for FREE as a PDF here: Mein Hut Songtext (GitA)