From the German Classroom

In German, the Year 4 students have been learning vocabulary related to items that we use daily and that one can buy at the shops. They then learnt simple sentences related to going shopping and asking for that specific item.

Role-playing is the perfect way to put the learning into practice.  This enhances the students’ speaking skills to make the foreign language meaningful and useful in conversation. It improves the students’ communication skills in learning a new language, and then in turn develops their interaction with one another. This also strengthens social skills including student collaboration. Role-play gives students the opportunity to experience real world/life scenarios in the classroom and learn from each other.

We first watched a short video showcasing Year 4 students from a school in Germany, who role play going on a shopping trip using the same vocabulary and sentences that the students had learnt.

This gave the students some inspiration to work on their own role-plays. They were then divided into small groups to plan and practice their own shopping trip. They chose the roles of either a shopkeeper/assistant or the person shopping and selected the items they wanted to purchase using some props in my classroom. Then the students were given the opportunity to present their role-plays.

The students were really motivated and had a lot of fun acting out the conversations and were able to put what they had learnt in theory into practice.

Looking forward to many more.

Frau K. Pani
Primary School German Teacher

https://www.niu.edu/citl/resources/guides/instructional-guide/role-playing.shtml