German Date #5: Another Zoo Map

Froggy saw Hoppo’s zoo map and wanted to make one of his own. Only he wanted to start from scratch and use paint! I, of course, told him he could … as long as he did it in German 🙂

We taped together two pieces of heavy painting paper, and then Froggy laid out the animals where he wanted them to be in the zoo. He drew paths, lakes, rivers, and boulders. Then he started painting. He got about half of it finished before he’d had enough. Well, the paints were poured, so together we finished it up. Today, on our German date, he finished it up by putting on the stickers. Then I labeled the animals for him. Of course, I asked him to say the animal names as we did the work.

Here is a look at how it all came together:

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Laying out the animals

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Drawing the zoo elements

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Painting!

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The painting phase is complete

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Time to add the stickers!

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The finished product 🙂

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German Date #4: More Space!

Froggy has been enjoying our German dates so much, he wanted to do more! So we decided that he would go on another date this week with AP2. Of course, he wanted to keep talking about space. I just happened to have ordered some space workbooks in German, and they arrived Thursday afternoon. He’s really into sticker workbooks right now, so he was VERY excited 🙂

He worked through 4 or 5 pages of the book. Hippo and I happened to crash their date at the last minute, so I got to see some of it in action 🙂  AP2 was doing a lot of the reading, but then we got Froggy to read out loud, too. The workbook provided some good challenge with a number of words that he didn’t know.

The workbook we used is called Mitmach-Heft Weltraum (Was ist was Junior) (Tessloff, 2016). I bought it on Amazon.de for about €5.

German Date #2: More Space Games

This was the second week in a row that Froggy and I went on a German date after school. We went for frozen yogurt at a place that was pretty empty and chose a nice big table to play a space game. Today it was Weltraum Memo (Space Memory). At first, he tried to back out of it, saying he’d rather go home and watch something. But then I offered fro yo (ehem, I mean “ice cream”) instead of hot chocolate, and he was game (excuse the pun!).

We played two rounds of Weltraum Memo. I had to prompt the German often, but that was okay. He even repeated some whole sentences. (That counts as a full triumph around here!)

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Variation of the game:

Froggy & AP2 came up with a new version of the game, since there are three of each card (one with picture & word, one with picture, one with word). They used the cards with both picture and word as the “control”. Those cards were dealt evenly between the two of them and laid out in front of each player. The remaining cards were turned over, as usual. Players took turns turning over two cards at a time to find a match. But! You could only keep the cards if the set matched one of your own control cards.

For example, if I had “der Mond” and Froggy turned over the match for “der Mond,” he could not keep it. I would have to remember where it was on my turn and collect the match myself.

Another variation would be to turn over all the cards, and in order to collect a match, you would have to find all three matching cards! We haven’t been brave enough to try that one yet 🙂

You can find the cards to download and print on this post.

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