19. Oktober '13 - "Gib mir den Ball!"

Guten Abend!

We started out with the students switching homework assignments with one another, correcting them, and then analyzing the sentences on the board for what was right versus grammatically wrong.

Then there were *FIRE ALARM FIRE ALARM FIRE ALARM* Huh? Oh, it's a fire drill.

Now where were we? Then there were two group activities involving vocabulary we have learned in previous weeks.
At first, I drew a house floor plan on the board, with each room and significant furniture piece labelled, and the students copied this down and translated it all into German in pairs. Then, likewise in pairs, they re-designed it into their own houses, potentially "Dream Houses" involving such things as indoor swimming pools or, for some reason, a fountain filled with Arizona Tea. Mine had a king-size hammock and a water slide that lead from the bedroom to a giant indoor pool to make waking up in the morning easier.

Getting back to the current grammar unit, we reviewed what we had learned to date on the Dative case, and then went further by delving into the idea of indirect versus direct objects, and how the Dative is used for indirect, whereas direct objects take the Accusative. As a warm up, afterward, we did a challenging group exercise with the class divided into two teams.
A slew of truly random words, including 6 nouns, 3 prepositions, and 3 verbs were written on the board, and the two teams had to somehow form these into coherent sentences with correct verb conjugation and noun declensions. While at first deemed impossible, the results were laudile.

And then there was pizza.

Post-pizza, we threw projectiles at one another, as is our preferred learning style.
This game is called, "Gib mir den Ball!" wherein names are called, responses of "Gib mir den Ball!" are given, and then the ball is tossed to another player, and this continues around the circle. We had 3 balls and a dictionary in the air at once. Anyone who failed to say the phrase correctly or who missed a catch (usually me) crouched in the center of the circle, and then was tagged back in when someone else was knocked out of play.

Now for the homework:
Translate the following, paying careful attention to both the dative (for indirect objects) and accusative (for direct) declensions.

• I’m throwing the football to my brother
• I’m throwing my brother to the football.
• The football is throwing me to my brother
• The football is throwing my brother to me
• I am running in the room
• I am running into the room
• The dog is throwing the football and my brother to me in the room.

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