In this story we create food-themed characters and then make up silly stories about them. The jumping off point to this story was a character a student created independently, then we expanded on that with the class. This makes it much more likely for students to remember food-related vocabulary  and verbs when  it's time for an assessment.

In German 2, the student created characters about the weather, which we turned into a longer story. This makes discussing the weather more interesting when they've developed that vocabulary and are ready for small talk.

In German 3 &4 students are ready for more complicated stories such as legends and fairytales! After a lot of exposure to the present tense, the students are ready to listen to full stories in the past tense. We have great fun retelling those stories, and pushing ourselves to speak more. This semester we've heard Fairytales such as: "Der Froschkoenig" "Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten" and Legends of the "Lorelei" and "Der Rattenfaenger von Hameln"