As part of our unit on the environment the 8th graders learned about artists who are making art from trash. Here are some pictures of what they came up with in return.
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In both 7th and 8th grade, we learned a little bit about German Christmas traditions. Germany has a rich Christmas culture, many of the German traditions were adopted into the culture of other countries. One example for this is the tradition of the Christmas tree.
To have some holiday spirit in our classroom, we celebrated St. Nikolaus in 7th grade by putting a shoe out and learning a Nikolaus song. We will continue the holiday celebration after our quiz this week by writing Christmas cards and talking about our own holiday traditions. In 8th grade we wrote something nice about everyone in class and put this letter into an Adventskalender. Every day one student gets to open one of the envelops to look at their letter and enjoy some German candy. On the last day before the break we will be making Gingerbread houses. Part of what we are currently learning in 7th grade is clothing. And what better way to learn the German words or clothing articles than to have a little fashion show and put some weird and way too big clothing on! This is more fun than filling in worksheets and studying vocabulary sheets. (for both, the students and Frau Walter!) Everyone is doing a fantastic job on recognizing the vocabulary when Frau Walter is using it, as well as pronouncing the new words! In order to celebrate German week and German American Day on 10-06, we did a scavenger hunt in all my classes. 6th grade did a hunt on finding out information on famous German people and hunted for German words in the classroom. 7th and 8th grade did a six station hunt to find out the most information with 5 minutes at each station. At these stations they learned about the different "states" of Germany, what countries Germany is bordered by, the flags of German speaking countries and the German states and famous German products, people and inventions. They also puzzled Germany back together at one station. The winners received a gift in class consisting of German candy and a sticker.
Eighth grade students also learned about the Berlin wall and the separation of East and West Germany. We talked about what different products both countries had, the circumstances under which the wall went up and how life was different in both parts. As a creative assignment the students either wrote a story or song/rap or drew a picture showing what they learned. Here are some examples: On Wednesday we had a small Oktoberfest in our 8th grade classroom. The room was decorated by Frau Walter in blue and white (the colors of the Bavarian Flag) and some fall decorations. Both 8th grade German classes got to bring German food and celebrate the German tradition with music, food and a game. First we listened to the live-stream of the Oktoberfest on www.br-online.de to listen to the oompa music they were playing there. This was followed up by our own music and dance, when we danced to "Das Fliegerlied." After that the buffet was opened for our fest. Once everyone had settled down in their seats, we made teams and played Jeopardy with questions about the Oktoberfest as well as other categories, such as "Flashback to 7th grade" and "grammar." We had some really good food and I want to say "Thank you" to all the students, who contributed to this! I hope you had as much fun as I did. Sorry to everyone, who missed the festivities because of your NYC field trip or for other reasons, you were missed! For our first class project this year, we made facebook posters to introduce ourselves. It was a nice way to get to know all my students and for my students to get to know each other better. And since I made one myself as well, they were able to get to know me, too. We wrote about our favorite activities and put a picture of us on it, as well as some pictures of friends. Some of us colored the bars in as well and stuck the whole thing on colored paper to make it stand out more. A lot of the posters are featured in our classroom. For fellow teachers, you can download a copy of the template I created right here.
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