What’s Inside?

While it is true that Barnes & Nickel’s notebooks were born from pandemic teaching panic, our notebooks and extension materials are perfect for whatever your school is planning for this next year, and years to come!

Today I want to give you a tour of what we have to offer and how our materials can save you from spending your evenings and weekends prepping and planning for the week ahead!

Let’s start with our Notebooks. Our Notebooks are complete Units of study and include everything you need from start to finish to teach your students!

How do we create our Notebooks and Notebook themes?

When we create a notebook theme we think about what situations our students would be in when traveling, studying, or living in a German-speaking country. We then come up with a list of the real-life skills our students will need to learn in order to be successful in that situation. It might be ordering food at a Döner Laden, navigating the streets of Wien, or even living with a Gastfamilie! We start by creating a performance assessment (what do we want our students to be able to do!) and build a list of words from there use backward design to create our units. We always keep what we want our students to be able to do in our minds as we create the tasks, Lernziele, and the input for each notebook.

Each one of our notebooks includes the following:

Language Input: We all know that learning a language requires a lot of input! We like to think about all of the different types of language input our students would come across in the German-speaking world. We use original Instagram posts, emails, blogs, travel guides, brochures, dialogues, text messages, stories, etc. to give our students language examples and to give them practice reading, and speaking.

Speaking & Listening Activities: All of our notebooks include listing activities and opportunities for our students to use their voices to complete tasks.

Interactive Activity Pages: Our notebooks include lots of interactive tasks for students. Our drag and drop activities allow students to learn the language in a variety of different “hands-on” ways.

Vocabulary: All of our notebooks include vocabulary lists, links to Quizlet and Gimkit as well as audio files so your students can hear their vocabulary words over and over when they need extra help with pronunciation. Our vocabulary is recycled throughout our curriculum to ensure that students retain the words they are learning.

Assessments & Rubrics: While many of our activities can be used as formative assessments, each notebook contains 2 sumative assessments in the presentational and interpersonal modes. These assessments have rubrics included that can be customized to fit your grading procedures.

Take a look at our latest German 2 Notebook here:

The pacing of the notebook materials will vary from teacher to teacher, I personally pace for about 1.5 weeks per notebook tab (I teach a 50 minute class period), but will alter that amount of time if my students have not mastered the material.

While our Notebooks are a complete unit in themselves, this year we have added on our extension materials, these materials super-charge our notebooks and create more opportunities for student interaction and practice!

Flashcards, Paired oral work, IGAs, worksheets, WebQuests, and Games pair seamlessly with our notebook creating robust learning opportunities for your students each day of the week while saving you time creating extra materials! All you have to do is print and share!

Makes sure to stop back next week for our Back to School with Barnes & Nickel Blog Series.

We will be sharing daily lesson plans for our notebooks, as well as some tips, tricks and freebies!