German Tenses Concept

I have been experimenting and have taught German tenses using a pictorial, dual-coding method which I have found more successful that normal “text book” ways. This is still explicit grammar teaching of the tenses, but it does away with the wordy grammar terms which don’t stick in students memory, but conveys the sentence structure in picture form.

I have found this incredibly useful by embedding this into the language of the classroom e.g. “we are creating sandwich and car sentences”, which helps with student self error-correction too e.g. “how do you make a sandwich sentence again?”

Each tense is made of 3 ingredients which form a whole picture sandwich and car (for past: not moving and moving), fortune cookie (for future) and bed (for conditional).

There is a PowerPoint to explain the concept and a sentence builder so students can follow the pattern straight away.