22.Februar - Teutoburgerschlacht

Guten Tag,

Today we finished our vast mural of the Battle of Teutoburg Forest and hung it up on the wall (it takes up the entire back wall) for all to see.

We also played, "Wo Warst Du?" the "lead your classmates around blindly" game that everyone enjoys and helps us practice both the past tense and the dative case.

I will be gone for the week--I'll be in France--and there will be a sub on Saturday.

The homework is as follows:

Choose a German song

• Either online or from a CD, find a German-language song that you like. Something that describes you or that you simply enjoy
• Bring the song itself (or write down the weblink or the name of it on YouTube) so that it can be played for the class next week
• To open class, each student will present their songs. 
• Provide a lyric sheet, and be prepared to verbally give a short summary of the song (in a few sentences, the main idea of what it's about and why you like this song). 

Mit Vergnügen!

15.Februar '14 - Crouching Legions, Hidden Candy

Cryptic title, isn't it?

We began the day with a bit of psychological puzzling, namely we took turns hiding candy around the room, and then the rest of the class had to guess where they all were. Any piece that could not be found in the allotted time period of 1 minute became property of the one who hid it. Some especially ingenious hiding places were in the CD player, behind a poster, between the whiteboard and the wall, behind the door... Suffice to say, it was interesting.

After a brief review of the past tense, we did round-robin storytelling, the thing where you pass around a piece of paper and everyone gets a set amount of time either to write a sentence on it or to finish one that came before them, culminating in one (in)coherent story. We did this a few times, and hilarity ensued.

Things took a turn for the surreal when a seemingly innocuous activity brought to my attention the existence of A GIGANTIC REAM OF PAPER WITH A GRASSLAND BACKGROUND in the supply closet. This brought us a moment inspired by one of my favorite cartoons, and I declared to the class, "Kids, I know what we're going to do today!" We began, and will continue in coming weeks, illustrating the Battle of Teutoburg in mural-form, to be hung all along the back wall of the classroom.


Hausaufgabe:

Now we attempted to peer-review the stories we had written over Teutoburg, but that admittedly did not go near as well as I had hoped. So the homework this week is to re-review their own story, considering any questions or corrections their neighbors may have added (and parents may help too, just this once!) and then bring in an updated copy along with a nice, color illustration. These will be hung up on the wall for posterity since words can barely describe how proud I am of these stories.

8.Februar '14 - Schatzsuch

Today, we ran amok around the school in search of treasure. Chaos Learning ensued, and it was glorious.

It all began innocently enough, with the sharing of our homework, as we do every class period. The stories the students wrote about the Battle of Teutoburg were, to put it lightly, surprisingly hardcore. The depth of emotion and the descriptive power of each of them was beyond anything I could have ever expected, giving us such treasures as, "Nur mein Hund hält mich warm in der Nacht... ich vermisse meine Familie," and "Das Blut meines Feindes fließt in die kalte Erde," and "Es war still. Ich sah nur den Tod."
These stories will be hung up on the wall, if not framed, for future classes to view in awe-struck wonder.

The Schatzsuch was, in short, a devious scheme on my part to force the students to use their knowledge of basically all we've learned so far this year grammatically to locate and then describe (afterward) an assortment of "Squinkies" that I hid all throughout the school in as odd (yet safe) of places as I could find. I have no idea what Squinkies are aside from "$4.99 at Walgreens" and "easy to hide," but they seemed cute, and 5th graders went nuts over them and had to be convinced not to take them from their hiding spaces, so I guess I stumbled onto a fad of some kind.
Anyway, the class was divided into two groups, and I gave them a sheet of clues describing where to find all the different Squinkies. The groups set out to find them all, and then had to describe to me afterward both what they found and where they were.
The girls' group won by a margin of about 30 seconds.

After lunch, the tables turned. The class hid the Squinkies and wrote clues, and then I had to find and describe them. The clock ran out for me when the bell rang at the end of the day, with ONE Squinkie left! Oh well.

Suffice to say, fun was had. We laughed, we cried, we GERMAN'ED.

And that was that.

Mit Vergnügen