Summer Camp 2020 – Middle-High School students week 1
What a great start of our summer project “Der Wald” (the forest). Our students join us online every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for one hour and learn about different aspects of the forest. Students learn new vocabulary by listening to and repeating after the teacher, reading authentic texts on worksheets and websites, listening to the sounds of the forest, watching short videos, playing games, and especially by presenting their own projects.
Outside of class, we communicate via Google classroom to post materials, helpful websites, and a little homework to reinforce what they have learned in class. One of these homework assignments is the activity “Der Wald” on memrise.com where they hear the words, must match their English meaning, and spell them out to gain long-term memory and improve their writing skills.
This first week we learned all about trees, leaves, needles, pinecones, and more. Each student chose a tree, labeled its parts, and by the third day, presented more information about it. Here you can see some examples.
Next week, we are going to learn about animals in the forest. There are different kinds like mammals, birds, or insects but also carnivores, herbivores, and omnivores. Animals have different body parts than people. It will be fun to discover the German words for those. Students will talk about what they like about certain animals and give a reason why. That requires them to use main and subordinate clauses.
We will continue to use complex sentence structure when we talk about the importance of the forest and the preservation of the environment during the last two weeks. The goal is to make our students ambassadors of our earth’s sustainability and improve their German skills at the same time.