The Year 3 students did a fantastic job creating their own weather reports (Wetterbericht) last term.

In small groups the students;

• researched the weather in a chosen German city
• wrote a weather report including the city name, the high temperature, the low temperature and a description of the weather
• created a poster to form the backdrop of their weather report
• use iMovie to record their dialogue.

Here is just a small example of the finished products:

If any students would like a copy of their weather reports, please come and see Frau Smith with a USB and we will transfer it over.

Here are some of the laminated weather reports hanging proudly in the German room:

Well done to ALL of the Year 3 students!

After a lot of drafting, working on pronunciation and producing a unique German profile, the Year 4/5 eBooks are ready to share!

All students did a fantastic job in creating a product that included writing in German, reading in German, speaking in German and sharing their German learning with their peers and their families.

Please enjoy the eBooks below!

Over the past two weeks the Year 3 + Year 3/4 classes have been very busy learning to become weather reporters… in German!

The first step was to write a weather report in German in small groups. Each weather report had to include:

• two days of weather (telling us days of the week)
• the German city the weather is being reported from
• a description of the weather
• the maximum temperature
• the minimum temperature

This week students are making a poster to form the background of their weather report. This will include a map of Germany, showing where the city is, and some basic information from their report.

The final step is to then take a photo of this poster and have students podcast their report over the top.

We can’t wait to see the final products!

This week the Year 3 and Year 3/4 classes looked at the differences in weather in Germany and Australia. In small groups students needed to use a device to research the weather in Adelaide over a 5 day period. They then chose a city in Germany and did the same.

With their data, the students then created a graph comparing the top temperatures in each city. We found that the German city always had the higher temperature, due to it being summer over there at the moment.

We then discussed how different this graph may look if we did the same task in February. We concluded that a February graph would show a much larger temperature difference as we have very hot summers and Germany has very cold winters!

Our lesson this week started with the profiles we worked through last week – although this week, we had to put them into a family tree! Each profile tells us the relationship to another profile so as a whole class, we worked to put the family tree together. All classes were very successful with this!

We then moved onto creating our own profiles, based on the ones we’ve been working with. We had to work out which information in the example profile to keep and which we needed to change to make it about a new person.

To help us with, we started to use Google Translate. We learnt, though, the importance of not translating at a sentence level – only at a word level! We used the tool to translate nationalities and countries.

This week the Year 3 and Year 3/4 classes revised short weather sentences in German. They did this by a matching activity in small groups – which showed that most students remembered the language!

We then started to create a weather dictionary in our books. This weather dictionary is a little different though. For each short weather sentence, the students need to fill out 4 boxes of information. They are:

• the sentence, for example, ‘Es ist windig’
• how it sounds, for example ‘es ist Vindig’
• definition, for example, ‘it is windy’
• picture of the weather

The new learning point in this activity is learning how to write it as it sounds. The older primary years are already practising this and it results in much better pronunciation. The young primary students did a fantastic job giving this strategy a go after being introduced to it this week.

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!

This week the Year 2 students have been revising their numbers to 10. They needed to write the number as a word, as a numeral and then show how many with pictures. We talked about how we needed to be confident counting to 10 to be able to learn the patterns when counting to 20. We also played a favourite class game of ‘Buzz’ to remind us of our counting!

After this task many students started looking at numbers to 20 in German. We discussed the patterns that most of the numbers follow (except, elf, zwolf and zwanzig!) and showed this understanding by colour-coding numbers. We now know that ‘teenager’ numbers in German usually have a small number (like drei) with 10 (zehn) at the end: drei + zehn = dreizehn = 13!

Finally we played the game of ‘Zahlen Kopfs” (Number Heads). This is a new game! One student sits on a chair in front of the class with a headband on. Attached to their headband is a number written in German – but they don’t know what it is! They  need to guess numbers in German and the students need to either say, ‘hoch’ (higher), ‘niedrig’ (lower) or, with two thumbs up, ‘ja!’ if they get it right. The students LOVED playing this!

The Year 3 students have been concentrating hard on learning their numbers from 11 to 20 in German. We have been playing games, listening to songs and participating in other activities to help us learn and remember them.

More importantly, we’ve been looking at the patterns you find in counting. Each student was asked to explain, using pictures, sentences or any other way they could think of, the patterns they see when counting to 20. Most found this quite a difficult task! They had learnt and could recite the numbers but found it much trickier to explain what was going on.

Here is an explanation by a Year 3 student, Lauren. She explained the number patterns very well!

Inspired by the podcasts of the Year 6/7s, our 4/5 students decided they would like to make one as well!

The Year 4/5s have been learning about how to talk about sports and hobbies they like and dislike and used this language, along with already familiar language, to write a script in small groups. They needed to focus on using plenty of language surrounding their likes/dislikes, adding in other questions and answers to make their conversation ‘flow’ and strive to speak fluently.

After rehearsing their scripts, the students used iMovie to record their dialogue, which we can now share on our blog!

Hugh & Ryan

Ashlyn & Josh

Jarrah & Tiana

Kira & Tkiah

Angus & Ryan

Elana & Kate

Felix & Will

Josh & Edward

Maddi & Abella

Amy, Molly & Caitlin

Maya & Amber