John Bald/language and literacy

Could not resist this, from The German Teacher.

German - Clicker Set, Time, manner, place.

This is the first series of Clicker grids I've made, and the idea is that each element is on a separate grid, so that pupils compose sentences by inserting them in the correct sequence. These are screen dumps of the grid, which operates using the program Clicker 6 (Cricksoft.com)  With the program loaded, clicking on the bottom right moves to the next grid and there is an optional speech engine that will read the sentence back when you click on the full stop at the end. I will demo to any interested teacher via webex. Having composed sentences, the children write them from memory. They do not copy, ever! No charge, and for the record,  I don't have shares in Clicker 6. NB - the screen dumps here are slightly fuzzy. The originals are crystal-clear on the screen.

A couple of wrinkles to make this type of grid. Select template in the Clicker 6 menu, and once you have a blank grid, click on it to uncluster the cells. This lets you resize and move them. Create new grids in the series by duplicating. To move to the next grid, right click on the full stop box, go to choose and select move to next. Repeat, go to send and insert send no text. The same will work for any multiple grid. Pictures or video can be inserted into any cell using drag and drop.

Freiheitsglocke, Helfer der Menschheit.

P. found the last lesson helpful, as it gave a preview of time, which was taught in class.

Not a full lesson this time, due to family illness, so I sent two stamps for her to investigate:

The goal here was to make the link between o'clock in English and die Glocke, as the oldest recorded clock in the UK, in Salisbury Cathedral (below,rt) , did not have a face, but just a bell, so two hits on the bell was two o'clock.

 

          

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Next stamp, a harder one, was;

 

P. worked this out, with help from the internet. Building on Freiheit, we considered the similarity between that and Menschheit, and added Schönheit and Wahrheit. All feminine, so we added die Arbeit and die Geschwindigkeit, also feminine.

So, why der with a feminine word? The answer is that this is the way the Germans say of or to with a feminine word.  As a learner, I found this one of the trickiest things to learn in German, as it is so clearly counter-intuitive.  I didn't mention the word "case" and won't until I'm sure that the word's function in this context is clearly understood. Presenting all cases at once, and expecting people to calculate between them like a kind of talking computer seems to me to make learning German more difficult. Building up to this through an understanding of the ways they help us to say things in German seems a better way, but this remains under investigation.

Viel Vergnügen!

 

 

German Via Skype and Webex. Lesson 3.

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.

 

German: First Lessons, via Skype.

Lesson 1. 30.12.14

The German toolkit on this site is an attempt to enable pupils to put their thoughts into German from the outset, orally and in writing. This lesson was with an eleven year old, who had been learning German for a term, with no textbook other than an Edexcel GCSE vocabulary book, and a small vocabulary book in which she had written some nouns related to the family. She had a subscription to a website, which did not include any sentence building. 

We began with pronouns. What, I asked, did she think Ich lerne Deutsch might mean? Are you learning Dutch? she replied.  So, she had been learning German for a term, and thought Deutsch meant Dutch. I explained that the words were similar, and had probably come from the same word originally, but that Deutsch was in fact the German word for, well, German.  What did ich mean?  I, she replied, and we got to the meaning of Ich lerne Deutsch, which Suzie, as we will call her, wrote. She left out the s in Deutsch first time, and so inserted it. 

We moved to Du lernst Deutsch. I pointed to myself, and said Ich lerne Deutsch, and then to S, who understood that Du meant you. She wrote the new sentence accurately. I got a figurine of an old man, and S understood that Er lernt Deutsch meant that he was learning German. It took her two goes to write the sentence, as she inserted an s in lernt. A female figurine gave us Sie lernt Deutsch, but it took another attempt to remove that s. We then discussed the idea of first, second and third persons. The first two were parties to a conversation, and the third was outside it. We moved to the plural, now signing with both hands, Wir lernen, Ihr lernt, Sie lernen Deutsch. S picked up quickly that w was pronounced as an English v. We sang the conjugation a couple of times to the verb song from the toolkit, and moved to colours, discussing the links and differences with English colours, and the German pronunciation and spelling, including umlauts and how vowels came to be known as vowels. S did know that German nouns could be masculine, feminine or neutral.

Lesson 2. 31.12.14

S remembered what we'd done yesterday, and was amused at the name I'd given her. I introduced sein and haben, then nicht to make negatives. This gave us enough to begin to build some sentences with Clicker, and to introduce the idea of the subject of a sentence as well as the verb. We made these sentences:

Peter ist mein Bruder. Ich habe einen Bruder. Ich liebe Peter. Peter liebt mich.  Ich liebe meinen Vater und meine Mutter. Ich hasse Sam nicht. Ich bin seine Schwester. Wunderbar.  Alles klar? Ja.   

Then some tenses:

Ich lerne Deutsch.   

Ich habe Deutsch gelernt.                           

Ich werde Deutsch lernen.

and finally Gern.  We looked at some illustrations from Google - Bleib ruhig und lerne Deutsch - and I passed Suzi's dad the address of the primary materials from the Goethe Institut. Mum said she'd loved the lessons.

Lesson 3 follows.