Tag Archives: Vocabulary

Buchstabe der Woche: O

Posted in Alphabet, Buchstabe: O, Uncategorized by

This week we’ll be starting our work on the letter O! The words in this unit are:

  • das      Obst                          fruit
  • das      Ohr                            ear
  • die       Oma                          grandma
  • der      Opa                          grandfather
  •             orange                      orange (color)
  • die       Orange                     orange (fruit)
  • der      Orang-Utan               orangutan
  • das      Ornament                 ornament
  •             ost                             east
  • das      Osterei                      Easter egg
  • der      Osterhase                 Easter bunny
  • der      Otter                          otter

I would have liked a little more variety. There are some sets of similar words – Oma & Opa, orange & Orange, Osterei & Osterhase – but sometimes it depends on what objects I can find!

I think I will try to group them by the kind of sound that the O makes.

  1. Oma, Opa
  2. Obst, ost, Osterei, Osterhase, Otter
  3. Ohr, orange, Orange, Orang-Utan, Ornament

Here’s what the cards look like:

This are the all-caps version. You can download the cards below in all-caps or in upper and lower case letters.

I also decided to try creating a backing paper for the cards. Sometimes you can see through the cards, even when I print on cardstock. That doesn’t make for a very good game of memory or go fish! So I created these papers to be printed on the opposite side of the word cards. To be fair, I haven’t tried them myself yet! My print-outs were already laminated. But I’ll try it for sure next time and report back on how it went.

Wortschatz Karten letter backing O-page-001

There has been a lot of activity on the blog recently! But I never hear from my visitors 😦  I would love to hear how you are using the materials! And if you have other ideas, that would be great!

Viel Spaß!

Buchstabenarbeit – Working with Letters

Posted in Alphabet, Uncategorized by

I’ve been posting about the letter work I’m doing with the boys. (See letter B, letter P, letter M, and letter A.) But what do we do with the objects and cards? Well, there are any number of things you can do! Sometimes I just follow Hippo’s lead and let things happen spontaneously. But here are a few ideas….

We lay out the cards (with image and word) on his little desk. Then he fishes an object out of the bag – nicht anschauen! – and matches the object to the card. And we say the object name. If he doesn’t know it, I might say the beginning sounds, and then he remembers it. And there is plenty of emphasis on the first sound, which is after all what we’re practicing!

I also wrote about my box of letter stickers. Both of the boys love to work with the tiny drawers of stickers. For Froggy, I let him draw a card and spell it in stickers. But for Hippo (who is still just learning his letters in English), I choose some of the shorter words to spell.

Sometimes we play Memory (Memo). Hippo can’t handle too many cards yet. So today we just played with a set of 4 cards. We put out the “control” cards with images and words (and their matching objects) and then turned over the image cards and the word cards. Once we found a match, I asked Hippo what the word card was. We compared it to the “control” card with the word and image to see if the words matched. At first he just said, “yes” to everything. But then he looked more closely. I had him count the letters in the two words, and he saw that they were not the same. Then he really got the idea!

As we played, Hippo then had the idea to line up the matching cards under the “controls”.

These are just a few ideas to get you started! Please comment and let me know what you come up with to do with the letter cards!

Viel Spaß!

Buchstabe der Woche: A

Posted in Alphabet, Buchstabe: A, Uncategorized by

While I was working with Hippo last week on the letter M, I realized that still does not know all of his lower case letters! He was spelling some of the words with alphabet stickers, but he couldn’t use the letter cards as a model, because he did not know the lower case letters. Tja! So this week, I have the letter A cards in both upper and lower case letters to download 🙂

The words in this unit are:

  • der    Aal                                    eel
  • das    Achteck                           octagon
  • der    Adler                                eagle
  • der    Affe                                  monkey
  • das    Ahornblatt                      maple leaf
  • die     Ameise                            ant
  • die    Ampel                              traffic light
  • die     Ananas                            pineapple
  • die     Anemone                        sea anemone
  • der    Anker                               anchor
  • der    Apfel                                apple
  • der    Arm                                  arm

The cards look like this:

As always, there are cards with images and words, just images, and just words. Although they are not shown here, I also have cards with words in all caps.

Download the PDF file of cards with words in upper & lower case for FREE here: Wortschatzkarten A – GitA

Download the PDF file of cards with words in all upper case for FREE here: Wortschatzkarten A – ALL CAPS – GitA

UPDATE (5 October 2017):

Of all things, Hippo found a mistake in my original cards! Somehow, I had the word card for Ampel with the wrong article. I have corrected the mistake and updated the files! (I did not update the image of the cards, but be assured – the PDF version is correct!)

 

Buchstabe der Woche: M

Posted in Alphabet, Buchstabe: M, Uncategorized by

I’m pretty well behind in posting all of the materials I’m creating for our German alphabet study. I’ll get as much up as I can. But I’m trying to make sure that I’m spending my time on teaching my kiddos and not just posting to the blog 🙂 Eventually, I’ll get everything posted!

We’ll be starting the letter M on Monday. So I have just finished up the vocabulary cards to go with our letter study. They look like this:

There are also cards with just pictures and just words.

You can download them here for FREE: Wortschatz Karten M – GitA

Buchstabe der Woche: P

Posted in Alphabet, Buchstabe: P, Uncategorized by

I’m late posting this! We already finished P-Week. But here are the vocabulary cards:

This is just a sample. There are 16 words this week. And as usual, there are cards with images and words, just images, and just words.

I added four extra words, so there are a few consonant blends (Prinz, Prinzessin, & Planet). Plus the word Pyramide is kind of tricky. We are sticking to the simple words this week. You can decide for yourself which ones you want to use!

Here are the cards in PDF format to download for FREE: Wortschatzkarten P – GitA

Leave me a comment to let me know how you are using the cards!

Back to School = Buchstaben!

Posted in Alphabet, Buchstabe: B, Uncategorized, Word Posters by

It’s time for the kiddos to go back to school. At this time of year, I always get inspired to bring more German into their day! So I’m gearing up to begin our letter work. I did a lot of this work with Froggy three years ago. And now it’s Hippo’s turn. I’ll include Froggy as much as possible, but on a higher level, of course. So I am busy printing, laminating, and cutting! Because even though I’ve done a lot of this before, there is always room for improvement!

I’d love to share all these materials with you here. But I have also promised myself to focus more on teaching (and planning & prepping) for my kids and a little less on the blog. So forgive me if the posts are short & sweet!

We start tomorrow with the letter B. Why? Because I want to teach them in groups according to how you say them. The letter B is one of the easiest sounds to say. So that is where we’ll begin.

I’ve been collecting mini objects beginning with each letter of the alphabet. And I’ve created vocabulary cards to go along with each object/word. The words for the letter B are:

  • der Bagger
  • der Ball
  • die Banane
  • der Bär
  • der Baum
  • der Bauer
  • die Birne
  • der Bolzen
  • das Buch
  • der Bus

Because there is room on the cards for 12 images, I also added das Baby and das Boot. But I don’t think we’ll get to those. I thought we would introduce two words per day (for 5 school days in a week). We’ll see, though….

The cards are about 3×3 inches. There are three sets:

  • words only
  • pictures only
  • pictures with words

There are plenty of ways to use the cards! I’ll write more about that later…. (Dinner is almost ready!)

In the meantime, you can download the cards here: Wortschatz Karten B

Viel Spaß! I’d love to know how you use the materials! Please comment below!

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!

Weather Plan: Week 2

Posted in Games, Language Themes, Uncategorized, Writing by

Our weather unit continues this week! I used a lot of printable worksheets from iSL Collective this week. They were nice and easy. I’ve included links to the pages here. I hope they work! I don’t think you need a membership to view them. (It’s free to join!)

  • Day 1:
    • Wetterkarte: “Wie ist das Wetter?” (iSL Collective) – This is a weather map of Europe, and you have to tell what the weather is in 8 cities. Only thing is, the weather is mostly the same! I ended up doing the writing, so the focus was on speaking and vocab (saying the phrases he had been learning).
  • Day 2:
    • Partnerarbeit: “Wetter in Deutschland Wechselspiel” (iSL Collective) – This activity is for two people. Each gets a map of Germany with the 16 capitols of the Bundesländer. But each gets the weather information for only 8 of those cities. Each also gets a chart to fill in with the 8 city names. There was a small error in that Düsseldorf was listed twice, while Bremen had been left off. Since it is a Word document, you could go in and correct it before printing. I just didn’t notice it in time. We also had a small mistake on my part! I thought the picture for Dresden was windy, but then I realized it was foggy! So we switched them. Focus here was on vocab, speaking, and writing. Here’s a glimpse at Froggy’s work:

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2017-01-26-16-36-15

  • Day 4:
    • Matching: Today we did another page from the set “Wie ist das Wetter?” (see above on Day 1). It’s a matching exercise of phrases. For example, “Die Sonne scheint” and “Es ist sonnig.” There is also a small exercise about seasons, where each season is described, and the student writes in the name of the season. Focus on reading and vocab, and also a pre-exercise of circumlocution (the ability to rephrase a word or idea in another way). He added a step by starring the weather that fit today.
  • Day 5:
    • Spieltag! We ended our week with a board game from iSL. All four of us played while enjoying a snack: Froggy, Hippo (although, he wanted to keep landing on the snow!), AP3, and myself. On a long Friday at the end of a long week, playing a game is definitely the way to go. I don’t see how I could have gotten Froggy to do a worksheet or some such. But a game – now that’s fun! It went quickly enough, but we still worked it in. For this board game, I just punched out a few different shapes to be our game pieces and grabbed a die. You roll the die, move forward, and complete the sentence according to the picture. Some of the spaces have arrows that either propel you forward or bring you back. My only complaint was that not every space has something on it – I landed on two of them during the game! Otherwise, we all enjoyed it!

2017-01-27-17-11-57

*I receive no compensation for referencing the resources here. I link them merely for your convenience – and mine!

Mein Körper

Posted in Books, Language Themes, Pre-K & K Class, Uncategorized by

We did a review of body parts in school this morning. I reviewed the body parts we learned at our last lesson and added a few more:

  • die Haare
  • der Arm
  • der Hand
  • das Bein

We sang “Kopf, Schulter, Knie und Fuß” again. It’s such a great song for this age group! It gets them involved and active. Plus, they already know the melody and get the idea of the song. Makes it easy to teach it! I think last time we sang the song, we all just stayed seated. But I found that having them stand and do it helped get them more into it. I’ll remember that for next time, too!

We read a different book this time: Das bin ich. Ich zeig es dir by Heinz Janisch (Tyrolia, 2015). It’s a really fun rhyming book that introduces all the main body parts. And ends with a laugh and smile in the mirror! I decided not to translate it for them, as I often do. Instead, I read the page and then asked them where the body part was.

das-bin-ich-book

I sent the children home with a different worksheet. You can download it here: Mein Korper – GitA (PDF)

mein-korper-gita

Learning Vocabulary with an Adventskalender (Advent Calendar)

Posted in Crafty Projects, Holidays, Uncategorized by

Years ago when I was teaching at a German Saturday school, I wanted a fun way for my students to learns some Christmas vocabulary. I remembered making a paper chain advent calendar as a child and thought I could combine the two into a fun activity. For the past few years, I’ve been working on creating something similar for my kids. This new version includes printed stickers (that you make using round labels). Froggy has enjoyed it for the past few years. And now Hippo is old enough to get in on the action. I have the words printed on two different papers, so there won’t be any arguing over whose turn it is to do the calendar!

 

Here’s more on how it works:

Materials:

  • round white labels, 1 2/3 inches in diameter (compatible with Avery 5293)
  • white card stock, 2 pieces
  • tape
  • scissors or craft (X-ACTO) knife
  • letter-sized paper in holiday print, red and green, or whatever pattern/color you like, 2 pieces (I have a stack of 12×12 holiday crafting paper, and I just cut it down to size: 8½ x 11)
  • glue/tape/stapler

Instructions:

  1. Print the stickers on the round labels.
  2. Choose which version you want and print out the Adventskalender on the card stock.
  3. Tape the two pages together to make one long page.
  4. Carefully cut slits in the bottom page along the two black lines. (You can use an exacto knife or the blade of a pair of scissors.)
  5. Print the chain vocabulary words on patterned/colored letter-sized paper. *If using patterned paper, be sure to print on the back (white) side!
  6. Cut out the vocabulary words. A paper-cutter comes in handy here! Don’t worry if it’s not perfect. You won’t really see the lines!
  7. Begin making your paper chain, securing your loops with glue, tape, or a stapler. Be sure to save one strip to attach the chain to the Adventskalender. Be sure the word is on the inside and the decorative side is facing out! You can put them in random order or in alphabetical order (like the Adventskalender). Slip the last strip through the slits you made in the bottom of the Adventskalender and then through the first loop on your chain.

Hang up your Adventskalender! I like to use double-sided poster tape. Each day, have your child take off one strip. Copy the word onto the black space (if using the version without words). And match the sticker to the word!

I used to hang ours on the outside of the pantry door in the kitchen. But this year, I hung it up in the dining room next to our German calendar. I like that the kids can see it while they are eating at the table.

2016-11-27-11-29-00

Download all the materials in PDF here:

Stay tuned for a fun craft to celebrate Nikolaus!

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