I taught the group pets, as many pets as I could think of and we had an OHT on the board with these on-with der/die/das and ein/eine/ein   with lots of repetition followed by quizzes -Wie sagt man "a dog"?   Wie sagt man "the dog" as the articles taking a lot of hammering in.   This was followed by "Was bin ich?" miming games-"Bist du ein Fisch?"  Bist du ein Pferd?" etc  They finally knew the words pretty well so I decided that the barrage of verbs would come next.

Our German assistant kindly agreed to act out the instructions from the imperative form as if she were a pet of various descriptions.

Bell-Bark   Spring-Jump   Schlaf-Sleep    Komm her-come here   Folg mir-follow me  Flieg-fly    Schwimm-swim    Setz dich-Sit down     Beiss-Bite!   Trink-Drink

Some of the verbs will be more useful than others in the great scale of things, but to include such items as Bite!! gives lots of opportunity for enjoyment.   Pupils worked out what each instruction meant and then they had to act out the verbs whilst repeating them.   Following this they were told which animal they were and asked to mime the action only if it was appropriate-if they were told Du bist ein Schildkröte-Flieg  and they started flying they were out.

The next stage was for pupils to match up the German and the English written forms of the words.

Practising these items proved a very good warm up for the next lesson when we looked at doing the Ich part of the verb with the -e ending.    This provided good practice by analogy with ich wohne and ich heisse that they had already met.

I prepared a sheet  of 16 pictures in a grid with horses swimming, dogs biting, cats sleeping and underneath in random order were the sentences that went with them:-Meine Katze beisst, Mein Pferd springt etc.  First of all the class had to give the number of the sentence they heard, without looking at the writing.    They then read the sentences aloud, before practising in pairs having to produce the sentences from the numbers.   We then contrasted the Ich -e ending and the Mein ..... ....t  ending.   For homework then class drew out the pictures, writing in the appropriate sentences and putting a speech bubble in for each animal, with the ich form.

This rather more unusual introduction to verbs seems to have gone down well.  We followed it up with a more formal presentation on the board of describing a pet with Mein Hund heisst... Er ist ..... Jahre alt,  Er schläft und beisst.  A feminine and neuter pet were also put up and pupils had to go away and do their own, one of each gender.

We are looking now at filming each child talking about their pet (real or imagined) so that we can send off a video-cassette to our exchange class.   

We have a good reservoir of verbs under our belt, the notion that verbs change ending and hopefully the foudations for going on to do similar things within a new context.