13.Oktober - EXTREME Hopscotch

Your first reaction to the title of this blog entry might be that I'm exaggerating or just typing in random words for the sake of getting your attention. Fortunately for the both of us, neither is the case. This is an actual game.

The day began with the children presenting the Speisekarte they made for homework--as always, they were absolutely darling! I'm did wonder why almost every single one of them made pretzels the most expensive thing on the menu, though. Were they just incredible pretzels?

This was followed up by jumping into our next vocabulary unit: Familie! The necessary terms are on page 19 of the kursbuch, and in addition we learned a few complementary words:
Die Geschwister - siblings
Das Haustier - pet
Das Lebensmittelgeschäft - grocery store (it just came up over the course of the day)

Adding to this was a short unit over personal descriptive adjectives, such words to describe oneself and others as klug, groß, klein, gemein, nett, usw. We then divided up into pairs and described an imaginary friend using 'sein' and the adjectives list. The vast majority of them were small, nice and in possession of far more limbs than would be considered normal. One of them was a rainbow pinata-shaped creature that eats children.

After lunch, the game that is the namesake of this entry was played: EXTREME Hopscotch (tm)

Essentially, it goes like this: a hopscotch course is laid on the floor, each space being a pronoun (ich, du, er, sie, es, Sie, ihr, wir...). On the other end of the course, about 6 feet away, were four buckets, each labeled with a verb ending (e, t, st, en). For each student's turn, I would say a conjugated verb, e.g. "Ich spiele." They would then run the course, stopping at the appropriate pronoun, and then throw a tennis ball into the appropriate basket (so in this example, hop through the course to 'ich,' then throw a ball into 'e.')
For double or triple points, they could repeat what I had said and then say what it meant. The game-winning score was "Du spielst."

With that, we ended the day.

Now for the homework!

Stammbäume (family trees):
Make a family tree.

• Include pictures (photos, clip art, celebrity pics from magazines, hand drawn, usw..)
• Include names and family relations (e.g. "Onkel Jim")
• Use at least all the terms on page 19 of the book, but feel free to go further
• For 10 bonus points, write 5 sentences describing family members
• Make it pretty (lines and stick figures on notebook paper will not be accepted!)

Mit Vergnügen!