To begin, I write 7 dates on the board. I don't tell the kids what they are - or even that they're dates, just simply write, for example, "08/05/1987" (keep in mind the European system is dd/mm/yyyy). The dates I use are things like my birthday, the day I graduated college, the day I graduated high school, the first day I ever went to school (yeah ok, I just picked a day in the August 1992, it's not actually legit...) and various other semi-real important dates. I think I have 7 total. Then I ask the students if they know what the numbers on the board are. After they figure it out, I tell them they are all important dates to me, but I won't tell them what they are until they can say the dates correctly. We move to part two.
For this, I ask for 12 volunteers. The come to the front of the room and I gather them in close like I'm telling them very important secret info. This part can get really rowdy if the 12 volunteers don't stay quiet, so I find if you make them feel like they're in the cool club getting
top secret instructions, they're more likely to follow it. I hand them out signs with the names of
the months on and tell them they have to be absolutely silent
and not help the rest of the class.
Then the rest of the class is instructed to come put the kids with months in order. It's a good
way to get the class moving and feeling involved. Once they've got the months all lined up, we go down the line and each kid wearing the sign (oh yeah, they hang around their necks, they're pretty cool) has to say the name of their month in English and tell us what it is in German.
Then I take 7 new volunteers, rinse and repeat,
do the same thing only with the days of the
week.
After we've gone through the months and the days, we talk about ordinal numbers. I tell them we can't just say "today is January nineteen" we have to have a special way to say it. I begin with the rule - just add "th" to the end of the numbers. So I give them a few normal numbers and ask them what we would say. After 2 or 3, when they seem to have caught on, we do 1, 2, and 3. (I found it's good to ask them what first, second and third are in German, because I've had quite a few students who thought second was "Sekunde" which is only second in the time sense). Basically this part goes on forever. It's a lot of repeating and and writing on the board and repeating, but the important part is to have them say it everytime.
We then go over the construction of how to say a date/write a date. I'm following the British way at this point, because that's what's in their book and I don't want to confuse them. So I write out "the 19th of January" emphasizing the "the-day-of-month" structure. So that we can now go around saying our birthdays. This goes on for a while. Once we're done, we go over how to write ordinal numbers, without writing out the whole word "8th, 12th, 31st..." (that's usually pretty quick)
The next part is fun for the kids, but not necessary as it takes up a good 10 minutes: I divide them up by birth-months handing back out the month signs from the beginning, then they all have to write on their sign their name and birthday. For example: Emily - 8th May 1987 (yes, that's the British way to write it).
Quickly we go over years (it's pretty simple so it just doesn't take very long). Finally, at the end we go over the dates from the beginning.
I've had a lot of fun doing this lesson, and the kids all seem to really enjoy it!
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