Conversation Class Lesson Summary

Language Resident Name: Martin Siebert

Day and Date: Monday, October 3, 2016

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

Class theme/topics discussed: 

The “Tag der Deutschen Einheit”.

 Goal of the class:

Students gain basic historic knowledge about the fall of the wall. They develop skills to describe movie scenes.

How did you structure the class?

 20-25 minutes: Scattergories. Students are handed out a table with different categories. One of the students silently “counts” the alphabet, another student tells him to stop after a certain time. Now the students have to find words starting with that letter for each category. The first one to have a word in each category calls the others to stop. Everybody who has something in a category receives a point. If their word is only mentioned once, they receive three points. If a person is the only one to have a word in a category, he/she receives ten points.

35-40 minutes: Students are divided in two groups. One is facing the screen, the other isn’t. They partner up and watch a short video but without the sound (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tqEyhkyzr8 ). They describe what happens and what they can see. After half of the video they take turns. Afterwards, they try to make sense of what they’ve seen. Then they share their ideas with the class and discuss what happened in each scene. They then watch parts of the video again and try to figure out what the speaker and people in the video could have said. The information is then presented in class. Then all the students watch the video again, but with sound. They then discuss the things they understood and make sense of the video. The LR provides additional information and questions.

5 min: Short heads up for conversation class project.

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

Scattergories sheet, Short film, TV-screen, pictures GDR

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

The students had some problems to come up with words for the scattergories warm-up game but still had fun. The students were very interested in the movie about the events that led to the fall of the wall. 

How could this class be improved/modified?

Maybe other categories for the scattergories game would have worked better.