KS3 · German · Year 9
Fairy tales and poetry: da- and wo- compounds, imperfect
Storytelling: imperfect tense
Learn it. Recall it. Make it stick.
IllumED Slides
IllumED · 1/11
Your learning goal
I can use wo- and da-compounds to ask and answer questions about fairy tale events.
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Fairy tales and poetry: da- and wo- compounds, imperfect: 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 wo- and da-compounds to ask and answer questions about fairy tale events.
Key learning points
- Use the imperfect tense in German to narrative past events, mainly in writing.
- Infer the likely meaning of an unfamiliar word by knowing surrounding words and by the structure of the word itself.
- Da-compounds are used to replace and refer back to inanimate (non-living) nouns which have already been mentioned.
- Use wo-compounds to ask questions with prepositions, putting wo- at the start of the question before the preposition.
- Use dar- and wor- for da- and wo-compounds for prepositions starting with a vowel.
Words to know
- imperfect
- German single-word past tense used mainly to narrate past events in writing; e.g., 'war', 'hatte', 'gab', 'fand'
- infer
- work out the likely meaning of an unfamiliar word based on knowledge of the surrounding words in the text and the structure of the word itself
- da-, dar- (compound)
- prefix added to prepositions to avoid repetition of the noun
- wo-, wor- (compound)
- prefix added to prepositions to form questions
Common mistakes
Form questions with prepositions in the same way as in English, by adding a preposition at the end, e.g., 'What does he find out about?'.
German doesn't leave prepositions hanging at the end of questions like in English. Form questions by placing the prefix 'wo-' or 'wor-' before the preposition at the start of the question.
For parents, carers and teachers
- Encourage pupils to search up a simple German version of their favourite fairy tale and suggest they write some wo-compound questions and answers based on the German story text, which could be exchanged with a partner in a starter activity in a subsequent lesson.