3.Dez '16 - The Empire begins

Guten Morgen,

This past Saturday heralded the beginning of both the student-led "Meine Woche" presentations and also our largest historical study unit of the year, the Roman Empire and Iron Age Germania.

The Meine Woche presentations from this week went well, and kudos to those who took one for the team and went first. That's never easy, and they rose to the occasion.

Here is what we have coming up:


December 10th: Samantha, Ethan, Will, Anna U, Abby
December 17th: Peter, Paige, Grace, Anna L

In short, using the past tense, give me at least 5 slides covering your experiences over the week. These may be things you did, things you saw, or things you otherwise experienced. These should be real and not just fantastical fabrications. Saying nonsense in German is easy; speaking about real life is the real challenge. The slides must also include pictures.

A presentation should last at least 5 minutes. Saying a single sentence and then moving on to the next slide is not enough, nor is simply reading the title aloud and moving on. Each slide should be a short story on its own, in other words. Much like I do mine.

Example: A slide that says "Ich habe Pizza gekocht." Should not just be a picture of pizza, you pointing to the title, and then moving on. It should be more like, "Am Freitag habe ich pizza gekocht. Es war sehr lecker! Ich habe Kochen lieber als Bestellen denn Restaurant Pizza ist zu fettig. Mein Pizza hat Pepperoni und viel viel viel Käse. Mutters Pizza hat Zwiebel. Ich hasse Zwiebel..."


Note cards may be used during the presentation if it helps.


Please let me know if this will not work for any reason--we can shuffle around as needed so long as these get done before Christmas.

Our listening comprehension was a new find, "How to mildly annoy your cats" which can be found for your viewing pleasure here.

We later played Perfect FRED. This is basically BINGO, but I couldn't think of 25 regular verbs in the past tense off the top of my head, whereas 16 was doable, so we did FRED (4x4 cards) instead. It's "Perfect" because it was over the perfect tense. The cards had infinitives, and I called out the past participles. Upon achieving a FRED, the students had to use them in a sentence (e.g. "Ich habe gekocht") to prove they had the right spaces.

And finally, we spent a good deal of time talking about Every Day Life in both 1st century Rome and 1st century Germania (what little we know about the former) and comparing the two. We covered diet, housing, and technology. Next time we talk about clothing, economics and religion (e.g. Odin, Thor, Loki vs Jupiter/Zeus, Mercury/Hermes, Pluto/Hades, etc).

Enjoy the snowy day!