KS3 · German · Year 8
A new experience: perfect tense with 'haben' and 'sein', 'in' and 'auf'
New experiences: perfect tense with 'haben' and 'sein'
Learn it. Recall it. Make it stick.
IllumED Slides
IllumED · 1/9
Your learning goal
I can use the perfect tense to understand and write about recent experiences.
1 of 9
A new experience: perfect tense with 'haben' and 'sein', 'in' and 'auf': slides adapted from the imported teaching text; recall questions created from its keywords, learning points and common mistakes. Self-check practice, with no automatic grading or XP. Answers stay on this page and are cleared when you leave.
Original teaching resources
The original illustrated PowerPoint is available as well as the IllumED text slides. It retains the publisher’s design and credits.
Download original PowerPoint ↓What you’ll learn
I can use the perfect tense to understand and write about recent experiences.
Key learning points
- Strong past participles are formed by 'ge-' and '–en' surrounding the stem; the stem may have a vowel change, too.
- With certain verbs, often verbs of movement to a destination, the perfect tense is formed with ‘sein’, not 'haben'.
- With movement, prepositions 'in' and 'auf' mean 'into' and 'onto', and are followed by the accusative case.
- When starting sentences with time adverbs to sequence narration, we use word order 2 so that the verb remains second.
Words to know
- perfect tense
- 2-verb tense that describes completed actions in the past, e.g., 'I said', 'she played'
- strong past participle
- past participle that sandwiches the stem with 'ge-' and ‘-en’ and often changes the stem vowel, e.g., 'geschrieben'
- word order 2 (WO2)
- sentence order in which an element other than the subject starts the sentence; verb and subject invert so that the verb remains the second idea
Common mistakes
It is only the verb in a sentence that can tell us whether the action of the verb implies movement towards a destination or a static location.
The case (form of the article 'the' or 'a') used after prepositions 'in' and 'auf' tells us whether movement or location are implied, e.g., when the article is in the accusative case ('in den', 'in die', 'ins') it means 'into' and indicates movement.
For parents, carers and teachers
- For the final writing task, pupils can pick any new experience, but it might useful to steer some pupils towards the three experiences that have featured in this unit's lessons: a first day at a new school, a trip somewhere, or a time they helped out or did volunteer work somewhere.