Learning Through Experience: A Refreshing German Lesson! 🌞🥤

When the weather starts warming up and the days get sunnier, it’s the perfect time to introduce more relaxed and engaging activities for our students. Activities that are not only educational but also fun can be a powerful way to make learning truly memorable. Whenever a lesson is more interactive, students tend to enjoy it more—and, most importantly, they remember it better because they experience it.

That’s why making real fruit salad or mixing non-alcoholic cocktails is always a hit in our classes! 😄 This time, however, our Year 4 and 5 German students stepped into the roles of shopkeepers and customers in a little classroom marketplace, where they sold refreshing drinks like juices, mineral water, and sweet treats.

We started by writing a drink menu with prices on the board and gave our young “customers” some play money. Each student had a limited budget, which made the activity feel more realistic. And while the money wasn’t real, the skills they practiced certainly were! They had to ask for drinks in German, calculate totals, and make smart spending decisions—just like in real life.

A new student, Zlata, recently joined our class. Having lived in Germany and speaking fluent German, she naturally took on the role of the shopkeeper. Later on, she was joined—and then replaced—by Maša, who took over the selling duties with equal enthusiasm. Their participation added extra energy and authenticity to the activity and gave them both a chance to lead in German.

Zlata also became a source of inspiration and learning for her classmates—several students picked up new words and phrases just by talking to her and listening to how she spoke. It was a great example of peer learning in action.

The goal was simple: to use German in a practical, everyday context. And it worked! Students kept returning to the “store,” ordering drinks in German again and again. They already knew many drink names, but repeating them in context helped with pronunciation and fluency. They even picked up some new vocabulary along the way.

One word that stood out was Strohhalm—straw. And not just any straw, but a fun pineapple-shaped one! It quickly became the highlight of the lesson—some students even took theirs home as a souvenir.

This was just a regular 45-minute German class—but the students absolutely loved it. And no, they definitely weren’t ready to move on to their next lesson! 😄