24.Januar '15 - Du tanzt den Pony Pokey!

Der linke Huf muss rein, der linke Huf muss raus. Der linke Huf muss rein, und dann schüttelst du ihn auf. Du tanzt den Pony Poky und schaust nach den anderen aus! Ja darauf läuft es hinaus! 

This class period opened with a more challenging exercise than usual; instead of simply listening to a song, filling in the blanks in the lyrics and trying to interpret an overall idea of what it was about, we had a full transcript of a song and were translating and interpreting it in groups. At the end, I showed the video the song came from (My Little Pony) and we compared the interpretations to the source material.

The reason I think this was a nice exercise, and why we'll do it again in the future, is because it stresses the importance of context and idiom. There was a word, for example, "neigen" whose first dictionary entry was "to tend toward" with other following definitions being "to nod," "to bow," to incline." The challenge set before the kids was then to look at the whole line, "Du neigst den Kopf," and figure out which was the most likely meaning instead of blindly copying in a word.
We also had idiomatic phrases, such as "Darauf läuft es hinaus!" which instead of translating each word directly (good luck with that), became apparent as to their intention when they were presented in context; when sung, it's immediately obvious that phrase is basically "That's what it's all about!"
This song was a variation on the Hokey Pokey, by the way.

I am also very much hoping that such exercises as these will break dependence on (and confidence in!) Google translate, because attempts at using that with this were a dismal failure.

We also went over the Simple Past in some more detail, playing a story-creation game based on it, and began a lesson on Comparitives, and afterwards we discovered that I am terrible at basketball.

As last week's homework lead to some confusion, I shall re-issue it.

Hausaufgabe:

• Choose an online news article (it may be sports, world events, science, entertainment, religion, etc. but something from a journalistic source)
• Summarize it in about 10 sentences (not translate: summarize, as in your own words) using the simple past (not the present tense). 
• Cite the source

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