Category Archives: Writing

Mh mh macht der grüne Frosch im Teich

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

For the past two years, I have been singing the song “Mh mh macht der grüne Frosch im Teich” with my preschoolers and kindergartners. They LOVE it!

I usually do some lessons on farm animals in the spring, and we sing the song for several weeks in a row. I often bring a little canvas bag filled with my farm animal finger puppets (if you watched the video on counting farm animals, you know I have 12!), and I pull one out at a time. Then we sing about that animal.

Just because we’re learning from home right now doesn’t mean we have to skip the song! I made a video where I talk about the farm animals and what they “say” in German (yes! even animals speak differently in different languages!). Then I sing the song, using my finger puppets.

You can download the text to this traditional song here: Mh mh macht der grüne Frosch im Teich GitA

I also made a few coloring pages, a tracing worksheet, and a label-the-animal worksheet for the children to do after they watch the video.

You can download the PDFs here, too:

 

Zahlen – Tiere auf dem Bauernhof (Numbers)

Posted in Coloring Pages, Numbers, Pre-K & K Class, Uncategorized, Writing by

For my young students, I wanted to review numbers today. We count regularly in class, so I thought it would be a good idea to refresh the numbers. I also used farm animals to count, so that I can introduce them in a week or two.

I made a video of counting:

 

Then I made a counting sheet for the children to do at home. Count the animals in German, then circle the correct number below. There is a color and a black & white version.

Download the PDF here: Zahlen 1-12 Tiere GitA

If they want a little more of a challenge, I also have a worksheet for tracing German numbers.

Download the PDF here: Trace the words in German 1-10 GitA

I also found some cute clips of Graf Zahl from Sesamstraße (The Count from Sesame Street). I posted them to one of my YouTube playlists (It may look like the same video as above, but this link takes you to the playlist – you can click through the videos here or click on YouTube at the bottom of the video to go there and find the list):

Was für Wetter haben wir heute?

Posted in Pre-K & K Class, Uncategorized, Videos, Word Posters, Writing by

For this week’s remote lesson for my preschoolers & kindergartners, I wanted to review the weather. We had been working on it for several weeks before school closed. After our Hello song, we would review the words and record the weather in our chart.

Today I made a video to review the words:

You can download the weather vocabulary posters I use in the video here: Wetter Wortschatz Posters GitA

I created a weekly chart for recording the weather. It looks like this:

Wetterbericht Woche PKK 2020 GitA-page-001

I also made a page of cards in color or black & white. They can be used as a whole sheet to review the words. Or they can be cut up into flashcards. If you print two sets, you can use them to play Memo!

All three of these pages are included in this Wetterbericht (weather report) PDF: Wetterbericht Woche GitA

When I first talk to my young students about the weather, I ask them: “Was für Wetter haben wir heute?” (What kind of weather do we have today?) This question prompts them to answer with the noun form: Sonne – Wind – Regen (sun, wind, rain, etc.). It keeps things simple at first.

Later we can get into the question: “Wie ist das Wetter heute?” (How is the weather today?). Those answers can vary: “Die Sonne scheint.” – “Es ist winding.” – “Es regnet.” (The sun is shining. – It is windy. – It’s raining.)

If you want to practice writing some of the words, I made some worksheets a couple of years ago that work nicely with these materials. Click on over to this post about weather to find those!

Nikolaus Story Listening VIDEO

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

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!

Reisetagebuch – Daily Journal for Kids

Posted in Travel, Uncategorized, Writing by

Last year for our long stay in the Netherlands, I created a travel journal for Froggy. I had maps to show where we’d be traveling, a place to collect post cards or other memories, a sheet for addresses, etc. Most of that, I have to admit, we did not use!

But I am happy to say that we were pretty good about filling in our daily travel journal. Okay, oftentimes, it took a lot of prompting by me. And I ended up doing a lot of the writing. But he was only 7, and he was pretty tired by the end of the day!

I asked Froggy if he wanted to do it again this year, and he said yes! So I printed out just the daily journal part – one copy for each day we’ll be away. He loves to check out the weather, so I imagine he will at least be diligent about recording that! Hopefully, now that he is more comfortable with writing, he will fill in the whole thing by himself. Time will tell….

Tagebuch 2017 GitA

The page includes a place to record the general weather plus high and low temperatures. Then there is a kind of heading to record the main destination for the day. He can record how he felt and what he saw, and then describe the best part of the day. Of course, he has to record what he ate! And then a little extra space for something else – what surprised him, what was funny, what he liked or didn’t like? Oh, and of course, it’s all in German!

You can download the PDF for FREE here: Tagebuch GitA

Gute Reise!

Das Wetter – The Weather

Posted in Book Materials, Books, Coloring Pages, Pre-K & K Class, Uncategorized, Writing by

We’re doing a little review today in pre-K/kindergarten. It’s hard to believe it’s almost the end of the year! The children have learned so much! And I’m so inspired to do even more with them next year!!

One of the things we will review today is the weather. We’ll look out the window to see what the weather is like and what we see: die Sonne, der Wind, die Wolke. It’s a beautiful day today 🙂

And we’ll read Elmar mag jedes Wetter again.

elmar-mag-jedes-wetter

I prepared a coloring page for them as well. There are two versions. In the first version, the children can trace the weather words under the pictures. In the second version, I’ve given them a bit of a challenge. There is a word bank (Wortschatz), and they will have to choose the appropriate word to write under the image. I have plenty of each, so the children can choose what they would like to do.

You can download the PDF version here for FREE: Wetter Malvorlage GitA

Check out these other weather materials to go along with Elmar! And for other weather work, just click on the “weather” tag at the right!

Buchstaben: AU

Posted in Alphabet, Buchstabe: AU, Uncategorized, Writing by

I’m not sure how I feel about doing a vowel blend for the next letter. But that’s what comes next in my books: Mein ABC Übungsheft. So we’ll run with it!

There are two types of objects for this letter combo: words that begin with AU and words that have the AU in the middle.

  • die Aubergine – eggplant
  • das Auge – eye
  • der Ausstecher – cookie cutter
  • das Auto – car
  • der Bauer – farmer
  • der Baum – tree
  • der Dinosaurier – dinosaur
  • die Maus – mouse
  • das Raumschiff – spaceship
  • die Sau – sow (pig)

I made up cards with both all caps and upper & lower case letters. Here’s what they look like:

Download the PDFs here:

I came up with some new worksheets to go along with the unit. I was trying to find some things that both Hippo and Froggy could do. So the worksheets go in order from easier to harder. A little one will probably still need help, even if it’s just reading the directions! Here are some ideas of the worksheets:

There are even two word searches, one easy and one hard! Solutions to both word searches are also included 😉

Download the PDF here: Arbeitsblätter AU – GitA

Let me know how they work out for you!

Viel Spaß!

Buchstabe: B – Sätze schreiben

Posted in Alphabet, Buchstabe: B, Uncategorized, Writing by

Every day, I try to put a note in Froggy’s lunchbox … in German, of course 😉 Sometimes I just write something about his day. But now I’m also working in some of our letter work!

For the letter B, I came up with this crazy sentence:

Der Bauer isst eine Birne und eine Banane im Bus auf dem Weg zum Bären im Baum!

I made up some worksheets based on that sentence to have some more fun with the words.

There is the sentence with images, just the sentence, just images (to cut out and paste onto the sentence page), and just images to write your own crazy sentence!

You can download it for FREE here: B-Satz-GitA

Viel Spaß!

Weather Plan: Week 3

Posted in Language Themes, Uncategorized, Writing by

Froggy is still into weather, so we’re continuing with the topic. I have to admit, I haven’t gotten to work on my own materials much lately. So I’m still relying on some great resources I’ve found online.

I do have a couple of ideas up my sleeve, though! I found some fun books related to Weather and want to create some worksheets to go with them.

We also had an idea for a super fun project! We’re going to do a weather comparison for some familiar places. Well, sort of familiar. We’ll be comparing our own weather in Philadelphia with Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (where our 3 au pairs are from!) along with the Netherlands (where PER is from, and where Oma & Opa still live). More on that soon….

For now, here is what we’ve been up to this week:

  • Day 1:
    • A quick weather worksheet that also provided an opportunity to talk about dates (Datum) and seasons. The season part was easy enough, but we had to talk about the words Datum and Monat. Nonetheless, he zipped through it quickly, which was perfect for a tired Monday afternoon. The worksheet was a page from an entire German online workbook from Lehrmittelperlen. I think we’ll be using the rest of it for other topics, too! (Lehrmittelperlen is a site full of German teaching resources that costs about €20 per year.)

2017-01-30-17-18-50

  • Day 2
    • Today we read a simple book: Elmar mag jedes Wetter by David McKee (translated from English; Thienemann, 2016). I made up a worksheet to go with it. See my post for the details and download!
  • Day 3-5
    • Time to start a weather project! We are going to record the weather in our town (Philadelphia), Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. I’m working on a document for our recordings. I’ll post it as soon as it’s been tested and ready to go! The plan is to record the weather for a month and then graph our findings. We’ll see how it goes! I’d be happy with a week, I suppose!

Sorting Shapes

Posted in Uncategorized, Writing by

Froggy has always loved shapes. And sorting. And sorting shapes. Now that he is 7, he has added another interest: writing in cursive. He’s trying to teach himself, since they are not yet teaching cursive at school.

I love it when he takes the initiative to start a project. Especially when that project is in German!

The other night, when I was putting him to bed, he asked if we could work a little more on his latest project. He had grabbed a book off the shelf: Duden’s Kennst du das? Die Formen (2009).

kennst-du-das-formen

He was making a list of the shapes to sort them (and color-coding them, too, of course!).

2017-01-22-19-47-32

Some of the words are in cursive, some not. Some are not even spelled correctly. Some he wrote, some I wrote. But it’s all good! I was just tickled pink that he was doing something in German by his own choice!