Category Archives: Songs

Farbenlied – Color Song

Posted in Coloring Pages, Pre-K & K Class, Songs, Uncategorized, Word Posters by

Since I started teaching German to children, I have been looking for an easy color song. So far I haven’t found one that is just right. So I’ve been using my own.

It’s very simple – to the tune of Ten Little Indians. It goes like this:

Rot, orange, gelb, grün, blau, lila
Rot, orange, gelb, grün, blau, lila
Rot, orange, gelb, grün, blau, lila
in dem Regenbogen!

Just make sure you sing the word “orange” on two notes (one for each syllable). It’s a simple song, but we make it lots of fun by starting slowing and then going schneller!!! (faster) I always have to remind the kids to stay with me, and I tap the colors to the beat as we sing them. It can quickly get out of hand! But the kids love it 🙂

I made this video for my young students while we sare having to do remote learning, so you can sing along:

 

In the video, I show some word posters to refresh the vocabulary.

Regenbogen-page-001

I also made the comparative posters – schneller & langsamer – since we always say “schneller!!” at the end of the song before we sing it again. Here are the PDF files:

I’ll also send along a coloring sheet for the children. I made one in color and one in black & white, since I don’t know what kind of printer they’ll have.

Here is the PDF for the coloring page: Farbenlied Malvorlage GitA

 

Hände waschen! / Wash Your Hands!

Posted in Songs, Uncategorized by

We all know how important it is to wash our hands right now! And lots of people are talking about singing a song while you wash to make sure you wash long enough. There is a cute song in German about washing hands. It says that every child must wash hands until they are clean. But once they are clean, there is no towel! So they must shake, shake, shake their hands. If you sing the whole song while washing (including the part about shaking them dry), it’s about 24 seconds. Perfect!

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)

Grün, grün, grün – Halloween Style

Posted in Holidays, Songs, Uncategorized, Word Posters by

My 1st and 2nd graders are so squirrely! It is hard to get through a Story Listening lesson. So I have decided to try to keep the stories short (still rich with content) and sing songs for the second part of our class.

I came across the song “Grün, grün, grün” again recently. It’s such a great song for colors. But at the same time, I find some of the verses to be a bit cumbersome. I mean, “Schornsteinfeger”?! That’s something of a tongue-twister!

Then I found some super cute Halloween kids clipart and thought that would work really well for adapting the song. It would be even better if the kids’ costumes were truly monochromatic, but I think it’s close enough 😉

Of course, I made some word posters to help teach the song. There is a set with the color words and a set without them – your choice!

I came up with the following characters:

  • red – Rotkäppchen (Red Riding Hood)
  • orange – Kürbis (pumpkin)
  • yellow – Biene (bee)
  • green – Fee (fairy)
  • blue – Cowboy
  • purple – Hexe (witch)
  • pink – Hase (rabbit)
  • black – Katze (cat)
  • white – Geist (ghost)

Check them out:

You can download them all for FREE here: Grün, grün, grün Plakate GitA

Just take the original song and change the lyrics:

Grün, grün, grün sind alle meine Kleider
Grün, grün, grün ist alles, was ich habe
Darum liebe ich alles, was grün ist
Weil mein Schatz ein Jäger ist

I’d love to hear from you! How are you using these materials? And how did it go??

Viel Spaß!

Mein Hut, der hat drei Ecken – Follow-up

Posted in Songs, Uncategorized, Word Posters by

Earlier this week, I wrote this post with materials to help teach the song, “Mein Hut, der hat drei Ecken.”

My club kids had SO much fun with this silly song! They are my oldest group (4th & 5th graders), so they caught on to the vocab very quickly. Having the pages with the text and the words replaced by pictures helped us all through the repetitions of the song.

 

We still got the motions mixed up and sang words where they didn’t belong! There were a lot of giggles 🙂 But I always say that you remember things better when you are having fun with them!

I know we will sing the song again next week. I think we might take the final page – the one with the most images – and practice just the words that are left before we tackle the song again.

Go back to the original post to download all the materials for FREE 🙂

Mein Hut, der hat drei Ecken

Posted in Songs, Uncategorized, Word Posters by

I remember learning the song “Mein Hut, der hat drei Ecken” in school. It’s a simple, silly song, but it definitely sticks.

My boys love, it, too. Especially this extra silly version from Die 30 Besten Spiel- und Bewegungslieder:

I’ve been wanting to teach it, using this version. So today I finally came up with a way to do it! I have the text written out 6 times. Each time that a word is replaced by a sound, I use a picture instead of the word. I also have word posters for each of the words that get left out: mein, Hut, drei, Ecken, & nicht.

 

 

I’ll start by introducing the 5 words with the images. Then go over the entire song text. When we’re ready to sing the whole thing, I’ll start with page 1 (all words, no sounds). Then move on to page 2 when the word Hut is replaced. Keep flipping to the next page as more words are replaced by sounds. Until finally you go back to the original with all the words.

Of course, if you watch the video, you can also see how to use movements to replace the words.

You can download the PDF for FREE here: Mein Hut Songtext GitA