KS4 · German · Year 11

Mein Schultag: nouns and plurals, present tense, picture task (Edexcel)

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IllumED Slides

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Your learning goal

I can use the correct grammatical gender of nouns in singular and plural with the present tense of weak and strong verbs to describe a teenager's normal day.

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Mein Schultag: nouns and plurals, present tense, picture task (Edexcel): 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.

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What you’ll learn

I can use the correct grammatical gender of nouns in singular and plural with the present tense of weak and strong verbs to describe a teenager's normal day.

Key learning points

All nouns in German start with a capital letter and have a grammatical gender, either masculine, feminine or neuter.
Many German nouns have plural forms, but many are used either only in the singular or the plural.
There are nine rules for forming plurals in German. Plural rules should be learnt alongside the noun gender.
Weak and strong verbs have the same present tense endings; strong verbs change stem vowel for 'du' and 'er, sie, es'.
German has one present tense which conveys both the English simple present and present continuous.

Words to know

grammatical gender: way to categorise all nouns as either masculine, feminine or neuter
plural rules: rules applied to noun categories to support accurate use of plurals in German - rules 1 - 5 of 9 are covered here
weak verb: a verb that follows a regular pattern of changes
strong verb: a verb which changes its vowel in the verb stem of the ‘du’ and ‘er, sie, es’ forms

Common mistakes

There is only one way to form the plural in German.

German has several rules for forming plurals. The best way to correctly form plurals is to learn the rules, use an example for each rule as a guide, and frequently practise them. As in English, some nouns are used without plurals.

For parents, carers and teachers

The picture task in the exam will be followed by conversation on the broader theme. Practice for this part of the exam, following on from the photos used in this lesson, is available in lesson 3 of this unit, in the cycle called 'Charting confident conversations'.