Language Resident Name: Tilman Viëtor

Credit to Katherine Pérez, Mariia Glukhova

Day and Date: Monday, 02/03/2020

Language and Level (intermediate or advanced class): German, Intermediate

# of Students: 6

Class theme/topics discussed: Physical appearance

Goal of the class: Learning vocabulary to describe someone’s physical appearance.

How did you structure the class?

  1. Warm-up (Prior knowledge):

Focused Freewriting: What do you think about when you think about physical appearance? How would you describe your closest friend? How would you describe yourself? (3-5min) We talk about it and come up with categories for describing physical appearance. Then the students get to the board and fill the categories with as many expressions as possible.

  • Activity 1 (Input):

I show students a picture of me and friends of mine. I then describe some people in the picture, before I have the students describe the remaining people based on what they see.

  • Activity 2 (Guided Practice):

While the German music is playing, everybody walks around the room observing other people’s clothes, hairstyle, etc. As soon as the music stops, each student pairs up with the person standing nearest and they stand back to back. Each of the students makes statements about the other’s appearance. Repeat a couple of times.

  • Activity 3 (Task):

Detective role play: Each student gets a picture of someone who “has gone missing”. One of the students is a detective and the other one has to tell what the person missing looks like. The “detective” draws the person who is being described. Both students get to be a “detective” using one different picture each. After having done this, each group describes their partners’ picture and we all get to compare and see how accurate the description was (15-20 min).

  • Activity 4 (Follow-up):

What do students guess the occupations of the people on the pictures are?

After guessing and giving reasons for their guesses, in two groups, they each look up one of the people, then present their findings to the group.

  • Extra final activity:

What do you think the German saying “Kleider machen Leute” could mean?

We talk about it.

What technology, media or props did you use? (Internet resources, playmobiles, handouts, etc.)

Song, pictures of German celebrities

What worked well in this class? What did not work?

The class worked very well, even though we did not get to the extra activity.

First-impressions