This week’s lessons with the 4/5 students focussed on the importance of being able to find keywords. We discussed that even though we might not understand everything we are reading in German, if we can pull out just a few keywords, we can usually form some kind of understanding.

The first task we did was a question/answer matching task. The focus in this task wasn’t on what they meant in English, but on finding stem words that were similar – for example, ‘Wo wohnst du?’ went with ‘Ich wohne…’

The second task involved students looking at a profile of a character in German and extracting information. They were given a sheet filled with boxes where they needed to record information, such as the person’s name, where they live, how old they were, etc. As the students progressed they also needed to colour code each question: green if they understood the information easily, orange if with time and a bit of help they understood the language and red if it was completely new to them. The children did a fantastic job with this task!

Finally, they completed a self reflection of the lesson, following the traffic light process.

What a great start to term 3!