German – Stories for Kids

We’re learning German in our homeschool. Why? Well, because that’s what I learned and studied growing up. Plus, when I was in the Peace Corps in Hungary I listened to German TV stations because I understood that better than Hungarian. Anyway, that’s the language that’s easiest for me to teach the kids.

Not long ago, we started using using Bobo Siebenschlafer in our homeschool. It’s a book that has  a number of very cute picture book stories.  We bought both the book and the audio CD and are using these for building vocabulary and for listening skills. (I bought these from Amazon earlier this year, though there aren’t as many available currently and the prices are higher than I paid. Just keep your eye out.)

First, we read through the story as I translated and pointed to pictures. We’ve only tackled the first story, “Bei Bobo zu Haus.”   Another day we read it together again (and I translated as I read).  Then, I added that to their rotations (they do 10 minutes of piano practice, 10 minutes of typing practice and 10 minutes of German on their own each day). They had to listen to the CD and read through the story on their own twice.  

I also made a few worksheets that we’re going over together to help reinforce the new vocabulary:

This is pretty specific to this book, but if anyone else uses this you can download the worksheets I made Bobo Siebenschlafer vocabulary. It’s 4 pages.:

This semester we’re also going to try Rosetta Stone for the first time, though we STILL haven’t started it! One of my good homeschooling friends gave me a copy and we never got it set up last semester. I’ll let you know how we like it since it is quite an investment.

Related Posts:

If you are looking for German resources, I have some earlier posts where I shared some of the free German worksheets that we’re using in our homeschool:

Other Related Posts:

Free German Worksheets — this post includes more free resources I came across.  We’ll use some of these sheets again as well:

German Language Goldmine–German Flashcards, German Worksheets: This post includes some really cute readers (in German) great for beginners.  There are other links in that post as well to other free German resources:

Learning German Lesson Pages – One last post with a few pages I made for the kids a couple of years ago — such as this sheet on the colors:

This year (2014) I’ve made some German worksheet packets for my youngest. The first one is on animals. You can visit this post to see if it’d be useful. The packet is 9 pages and is free to download: Free German Worksheet Packet on Animals

If you found any of this useful, I’d love to hear from you over at our Homeschool Den Facebook Page!