This new website www.hausgemacht.tv has short "How to" videos, offering advice on many aspects of daily life: House and garden, Food and drink, Health and fitness, Family and pets, Sport and free time, Auto and technology, Saving and DIY, Rights and law, Job and career. The videos are uploaded by users, and are accompanied by a written summary.

This site offers lots of potential for listening practice or language extension in bite-size chunks. Some videos have a very polished look, others have a more "home-made" feel. Check out Oma Luzie's cooking for a particularly nice example of the latter.

Depending on your school's attitudes towards suitable content, this is, at least at the moment, a fairly safe browsing site for students. There are a few cocktail recipes, but most other potentially non-suitable content is not permitted.

Labels: german, links, teaching ideas

Most people know the "I'm going to market and I need x game, where subsequent players need to recite an ever-growing shopping list.

This timed game is also played in a circle and can be used for similar vocabulary sets. A card with a vocabulary item is needed for each seat. One seat (to the right of the teacher's) is designated the winning seat and the aim for the students is to be the one in that seat when the time is up.

Imagine the topic is food. The teacher starts by saying, "I'm going shopping and we need bread. The student on the bread chair responds, "We have bread, but we need milk". The student on the milk chairs responds, "We have milk, but we need potatoes" etc. If a student doesn't respond quickly enough, or makes a mistake, he/she move to the seat to the left of the teacher and the others move one place to the left. The teacher starts again.

The game can be made easier by having a list of possible words on the board, and more complicated by regularly shuffling the placement of the words around the circle of chairs.

Labels: all languages, games, teaching ideas

3500 Time is money! If you have spent more than an hour online looking for suitable German exercises for your students, or yourself, then you may have been much better off with a subscription to the Internet's largest index of interactive exercises.

With over 100 topics, it is easy to see what exercises are available online. Every exercise has been categorised by complexity and has been given a description so that you know what sort of exercise it is, who wrote it, and whether you will need extra software to make it work.

A year long individual subscription is AUD29.95 (approximately USD25.65, EUR18.85, GBP12.75) and renewing subscribers have a 10% discount.Almost 3500 exercises (or many hundreds more if you include where I have linked to a group of exercises on a theme) can be accessed through the index.

Labels: german, subscribers, website, what-is-new

I've added some more links to the German cartoon page. As with all external links, however, I can't be responsible for the content on these linked sites. Some have a commercial emphasis, and humour is fraught with the potential to offend. Nevertheless, if you enjoy humour, there may well be something here that will amuse you. Happy exploring!

Labels: german, website, what-is-new