German: Relative Pronouns Activity

Hello all, Chris here. Today I would like to share an activity I recently created to practice relative pronouns with my students. As usual, I will leave the grammar explanation up to the individual teacher. While this activity is for intermediate level German, it can easily be adapted for other languages and levels.

To begin the activity, ask the students to come up to the board and sketch a few city blocks or even a whole city with various streets, buildings, etc. These should all be labeled. At least 2-3 buildings should be labeled as apartments. Add details such as floors and apartment numbers for each apartment building. To make the activity easy you only need to add as many apartments as there are groups. Although, you could add a few extra empty apartments. Students will then have to state that no one is living there.

After this is completed, have students get into groups of 2-3 although having them do the activity individually is a viable option. Each group needs to pick a specific apartment they will live in. The groups also need to come up with an interesting fact about their apartment, such as they have parties every weekend, they have a dozen cats, they always play loud music, etc.

Once the above steps have been completed, have one student in each group go around to the various other groups and interview them asking where they live or Wo wohnt ihr? The group should also talk about their apartment and their interesting fact. Once all of the groups have been interviewed, have the students return to their groups. Now the students write about the various groups using relative clauses to add more information about the other groups. For example,

In der Obergasse wohnen Tim und Jurgen, die jeden Tag laute Musik spielen.

An alternative way to do the activity would be to have someone from each group stand in front of class and show on the map where their group lives and why their apartment is interesting. The other groups could then immediately start working on their sentences using relative clauses.

A good followup to this activity would be to have the students ask and provide directions to the various other groups and their apartments. I like to do activities which require the students to build upon previous knowledge rather than just singling out a single area of grammar. In this case you would be combining relative clauses with the puzzle solving aspects of giving directions (imperative).

I hope this activity works well for you! Comments welcome!