Tag Archives: Memory

Olympische Sommerspiele / Olympic Summer Games

Posted in Games, Uncategorized, Word Posters by

I’m finally coming out of my fog from the end of the school year. And I just realized that the Summer Olympic Games will be starting in a few weeks!

Four – make that five – years ago, I made some vocabulary cards for the Summer Olympics in Rio. I thought I would repost them here. You can read more about them in the original post.

There are 8 sports covered in this packet of materials. You can use them as flashcards, play games like Memory and Go Fish, and also solve some Purzelwörter – scrambled word puzzles.

Some of the words I chose are not the official names of the sports. As this is meant for an introduction to vocabulary, I went with simpler forms. For example, instead of Leichtathletik, I used Laufen. Clearly, Leichtathletik encompasses a whole lot more than just running, but for young children, it made sense to keep it simple!

Download the FREE PDF here:

olympische-sommerspiele-gitaDownload

Wir fahren mit dem Zug!

Posted in Games, Taking German with You, Travel, Uncategorized by

I can’t believe the summer is almost upon us! We’ll be heading back to the Netherlands and Germany for a few weeks. I will certainly be posting about our travels!

This year, we’re doing something completely new! Well, at least new to the kids! We will be taking the train from the Netherlands to Germany! I am SO excited! I just love the train 🙂  We’ll leave from Amsterdam, change in Utrecht, and arrive in Frankfurt. I just can’t wait for the boys to experience train travel in Europe!

Of course, I have to come up with some activities to keep them occupied on the long train ride. As much as I love to look out the window, I don’t think they will be doing that for the entire trip!

I started looking around for some train ride scavenger hunts. There are tons of them out there for car rides, so I figured it should be easy, right? Wrong. I could only find one so far! And it was for a trip in the US going up to Maine (click here to check it out). So while it was inspiring, it won’t exactly work for us.

So I went back to my travel scavenger hunt that I made for the car and updated it with new images for the train ride!

 

As you can see, there are two sets of things to search for. And for each set, there are three versions:

  • one with words and images
  • one with just images
  • one with just words

Some of the new vocabulary include:

  • die Baustelle
  • die Kirche
  • die Fabrik
  • der Bahnhof
  • der Fluss
  • der Wolkenkratzer
  • der Kran
  • das Schloss
  • der Tunnel

Obviously, a lot of these things can also be seen from a car! So feel free to refresh your old version of this travel game, even if you are going on a road trip!

I am going to print out the copy with words and images, one for each of the boys, and put them in their travel binders to play a game of I Spy. They can mark off what they see with a square sticky note or a pencil or crayon. I’m trying to travel extra light this year! So I won’t bother to laminate them. If I want to use them again next year, I can either print out a fresh copy or laminate it then 🙂

I actually will print out a whole set to laminate, so we can start practicing vocabulary now. I’ll cut up the squares, so we can play games like Go Fish and Memory.

Download the PDF for FREE here: Travel Games on the Train GitA

Gute Reise!

Under the Sea

Posted in Games, Language Themes, Uncategorized by

School’s out! Time for some summer fun!

How about some sea life cards to play a small game of memory? Or practice numbers?

Print out the cards on card stock (so you can’t see through the paper when it’s turned over!) and laminate them for longer use. You can download them here:

I also found small objects from a craft store to go along with the six words. I popped them into a busy bag with the cards and made a matching game out of it.

Viel Spaß in den Sommerferien!

Shape Resources

Posted in Language Themes, Resources, Uncategorized, Word Posters by

For our shape unit, we’ll be using some materials I bought a few years ago on TeachersPayTeachers.com. It was created by Open Wide the World, who has a number of German-language units. In fact, the weather unit I used last month was also created by them.

shapes-open-wide-the-world

The unit costs only $3.50, and you can purchase it here. And here’s what you get:

posters
a single page display featuring all 10 shapes
10 individual posters, one shape & shape name per page

game cards
“Bang!” game cards & directions
3 sets of flashcards for games & drill work: 1 set with shapes and shape names, 1 set with shape images only, 1 set with shape names only

2 mini books
1/4-page sized mini book: trace the shape name and draw the shape
1/2-page sized mini book: fill in the blank with the shape name, color the image, and read aloud with a partner (level = emergent reading, repetitive sentence structure)

word search
includes answer key

I’m excited to start using all these colorful materials!

Travel Games for Germany and the Netherlands

Posted in Games, Travel, Uncategorized by

We’ll be heading back to the Netherlands and Germany this summer. We fly in and out of Frankfurt and then have about a 5-hour drive to and from the Netherlands. So in addition to packing things to keep the kiddos busy on the airplane, I have a separate stash of things to keep them busy in the car.

I just finished creating a set of cards that can be used in a variety of ways. You can play Memory, I Spy, Go Fish. Or laminate an entire sheet and mark off the things you see with a dry erase marker (did you know they make washable ones?!) or a small post-it. There are two pages of various items – one for each of the boys (that way there is no competition over who sees what first!). And there is also a one-page set of just vehicles. At the end, there is an additional sheet to help count up a few of the things you might see on a long drive.

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Items included are:

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The vehicles page includes: das Flugzeug, der Bus, der LKW, das Fahrrad, ein gelbes Auto, der Bagger, der Traktor, der Kipper, das Motorrad, der Hubschrauber, das Feuerwehrauto, & der Zug.

I’d love to hear how you use the cards!!

UPDATE- August 2016:

Froggy really enjoyed the game of looking for items on his page. Hippo lost interest after finding just a few. We went with the option of covering the found items with post-its (the 1 7/8″squares worked perfectly):

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UPDATE – July 2017:

We will be taking the scavenger hunt with us again this year! But I also found another, longer hunt – with only German words! – at another blogger’s site. Check out THIS POST for more info!

UPDATE – May 2018: 

I have made a new version of my Road Trip Scavenger Hunt! This one is adjusted more to traveling by train, but it could work well from the car, too! Check out THIS POST to get the new FREE download!

German Date #2: More Space Games

Posted in Games, Uncategorized by

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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kleine Raupe

Posted in Book Materials, Coloring Pages, Numbers, Pre-K & K Class, Word Posters by

We have loved Eric Carle’s book about the hungry caterpillar for years! I wanted to share it with Froggy’s class last week. So I created some picture cards to introduce the words. For this set, I added cards with words and numbers, too.

Included in this set are:

  • image cards
  • images with numbers, 1-5
  • images with words (fruit in both singular and plural)
  • words only

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Print them full-size for wall posters or to have large images to introduce to a class. Or print them 6-to-a-page for flashcards or a memory or matching game.

If you want to use them for Memory, be sure to use a thicker cardstock, so that the images don’t show through 🙂

I’d love to hear how you use the cards!

Click here to download: kleine Raupe Posters  (PDF file)

In addition to the posters, there is also a coloring page with the caterpillar and the five different fruits, labeled with colors and numbers. Download here: kleine Raupe Essen Farben Zahlen Malvorlage (PDF file)

 

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Space Memory

Posted in Games, Uncategorized by

My 6-year-old is really into space these days! The other day, he found some German Memory cards in my office and wanted to play. He really enjoyed it 🙂  So I decided to make a space-themed German Memory game.

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Space Cards (PDF)

There are three kinds of cards included:

  • Cards with images and words
  • Cards with images only
  • Cards with words only

You can mix and match them however you like!

Space words included are:

  • der Asteroid
  • die Erde
  • das Hubble-Weltraumteleskop
  • der Jupiter
  • der Mars
  • der Merkur
  • der Meteor
  • die Milchstraße
  • der Mond
  • der Neptun
  • der Planet / die Planeten
  • der Pluto
  • der Saturn
  • Schwarzes Loch
  • die Sonne
  • das Sonnensystem
  • die Uranus
  • die Venus

I created the images in full-sized 8 1/2 x 11 sheets, so you can use them for posters. Or just print 4 or 6 to a page to created smaller cards.

Tips for printing:

  • Print on cardstock or on paper that has a pattern on the back side, so that the images don’t show through!
  • I printed the cards 6 to a page, and the size was perfect. Kind of like playing cards.

Viel Spaß!

Update May 16, 2016: I just discovered a mistake on one of the cards, so it is now updated!