6.30 pm, after Suzi's tea, and to fit in with other activities. Parents' comments on first two lessons very positive - "She's loving it," and "Thanks, it means a lot to us." Notes on lessons 1 and 2 are here.
We started by singing the verb song, with actions and a couple of little dolls to indicate masculine and feminine. Suzi had learned the numbers to 25, so we moved to telling the time. I started by explaining the link between clock and die Glocke, with the early clock in Winchester cathedral operating by striking a bell, as it had no clock face or hands.
We moved to telling the time, with me calling out times in German and Suzi working out what they were. If she got one wrong, I repeated it. We went round the clock. Suzi often stopped me while she took a note. This is roughly the sequence we used.
Es ist ein Uhr
Est is zwei Uhr.
Wie spät ist es, bitte?
Es ist zwei Uhr fünf, zehn, zwanzig, fünfundzwanzig
Ein Viertel
Es ist Viertel nach drei Viertel Pfunder...
Es ist Viertel vor drei
Es ist halb fünf. Half past four, not half past five.
Est ist Mittag. Es ist Mitternacht. It took Suzi two or three tries with some prompting to work these out. We'll practise over the next few weeks.
Suzi has a new teacher at school, and had written some sentences in an exercise book. We discussed some of these, and made some simple sentences. Lillie insisted on using ß and not ss.
Kein Problem Ich habe ein Problem. Ich bin ein Mädchen, und bin zwölf Jahre alt.
Ich wohne in Hartsholme, daß ist in Lincoln.
Mein Name ist Suzi. Ich heiße Suzi. Wie schreibt man das?
Wann hast du Geburtstag? Mein Geburtstag ist der zwölfte Februar.
Ich habe einen Bruder, aber keine Schwester
They had been working on animals and the family has two dogs, so I explained the plural and we practised pronunciation with umlauts:
Der Hund Die Hünde Wir haben zwei Hünde.
Der Hahn. Die Hähne. (Suzi had forgotten what this was.)
The dictionary gave me an amusing idiom -
Danach kräht kein Hahn. No cock crows about this, equivalent to It's no big deal, or nothing to write home about. Suzi thought the words were in a funny order, so I explained how this came about. We had looked at subject and verb in an earlier lesson, but it still took her three goes to find the verb in
Kein Hahn kräht.
Subject verb
We were using webex by now, and I was typing this into Word, in these colours. We went back to the original idiom, and I explained how subject and verb were inverted after what I called a starter word.
Danach kräht kein Hahn.
Starter verb subject
Suzi knew what a pet was -
Das Tier Das Haustier.
and we now stopped, as she was getting tired. Lesson 4 follows on Monday.