Courses · German · Kindergarten to high school
German
The language of Luther and Bach, of Gutenberg and the Brothers Grimm, the mother tongue of about ninety-five million people in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and a close cousin of English, taught the old way: stories first, then saying it out loud, then making things with your hands. Each short course is built around real people and places, Luther at the Wartburg, Bach at the organ, the Grimms’ fairy tales, Dürer’s hare and Friedrich’s mountains, and teaches the grammar those stories open up. An English speaker will keep meeting old friends here, Haus and house, Vater and father, because English and German grew from the same root. A student who has met our Latin courses will find the German cases familiar.
Choose a grade · Kindergarten to Grade 8
Ages 5–6
Kindergarten
German by ear: Hallo and Tschüss, colors, counting to ten, the body and the animals, sung, acted out and drawn, with a painting in every unit and a Bible verse in every lesson.
Ages 6–7
Grade 1
The family and the house, the days of the week, food and the table prayer, clothes and the weather, sung, acted out and drawn.
Ages 7–8
Grade 2
The alphabet and its Umlaute, school things, the months and Christmas with Stille Nacht, the animals of the forest, and the first lines of the Vaterunser.
Ages 8–9
Grade 3
Greetings and good manners with du and Sie, numbers and German arithmetic, colors and shapes, the family at table, and animals from the birds of the air to the family pet.
Ages 9–10
Grade 4
The house and its furniture, school and the verb haben, weather, dates and birthdays, likes with gern and mögen, and a tour of Germany from Cologne Cathedral to the Day of German Unity.
Ages 10–11
Grade 5
Why English and German are cousins, der, die and das, regular verbs and the verb-second rule, sein and adjectives, and asking questions.
Ages 11–12
Grade 6
haben and its expressions, going places with gehen and fahren, jobs and machen, telling time, and the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.
Ages 12–13
Grade 7
Numbers and years with Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, separable verbs, the spoken past with haben and sein, Bach, and storytelling with the Grimm tales.
Ages 13–14
Grade 8
Modal and reflexive verbs, the dative case with Luther at the Wartburg, Psalm 23 and letter writing, and the Präteritum with the Grimms’ storyteller and Gutenberg.
High school · German I
A full-year course for high-school students beginning German: 12 units of 3 lessons, one lesson a week for 36 weeks, four sessions of 40–50 minutes, with unit tests, a midterm and a final exam, and separate answer keys for the parent. A student who finished Grade 8 will know much of the first half and can move faster there.
Grades 9–12
German I
From Guten Tag to the Perfekt: sein and haben, the present tense, the accusative and dative, separable, reflexive and modal verbs, comparisons and the past, with Holbein, Friedrich, Kersting, Grünewald, Stieler’s Beethoven and Cranach’s Luther, and a verse of the Luther Bible in every lesson.
How every lesson works
Each course from kindergarten to grade 8 is a short course: 5 units of 2 lessons, one lesson a week, about one quarter of the school year. Each week has three sessions: 15–20 minutes in kindergarten through grade 2, where the lessons are sung, acted out and drawn, 20–30 minutes in grades 3 and 4, and 30–40 minutes from grade 5 on: one to learn, one to make, one to practice and speak. German I is a full high-school year with four longer sessions a week. Grammar spirals grade by grade, the way the old books did it: each year repeats the patterns out loud and adds one or two new structures.
- Warm-up. A few minutes of saying German out loud: the week’s sounds and phrases, the verb charts, with a puzzle to think about.
- Watch. A hand-picked YouTube video from an approved teaching channel, with a note on when to watch it.
- Learn. The story, how German works, and say it out loud, in short sections a parent can read aloud, with a pronunciation guide for every new word.
- Picture study. A painting or picture in every unit, Dürer, Holbein, Cranach, Grünewald, Friedrich, Anker, Spitzweg, Menzel, Franz Marc, to look at closely and talk about.
- Activity. The student makes something every week: labels for the house, a paper clock, a family tree, a café menu, a weather report, an Advent wreath, a timeline.
- German notebook and flashcards. A notebook of dated charts and sentences, and a flashcard deck that grows every lesson and is drilled every session.
- Worked examples and practice. Translation drills in both directions, German to English and English to German, with answers to check, easy through challenge.
Each unit ends with a short review and a unit challenge, from a song in kindergarten to a fairy tale performed in Grade 6, Psalm 23 in Grade 8 and a journey through the German-speaking lands presented at the end of German I.
Every lesson has a Bible verse in the King James Version beside the Luther Bible in its 1912 revision, the German Bible that shaped the German language itself.
Nothing needs to be bought. Activities use index cards, paper, pencil, crayons and things from around the house. Each unit also lists optional books and free resources.
Every course can also be downloaded as one printable PDF, with the video links printed in each lesson. Worksheets come with separate answer keys for the parent.
Videos open on YouTube. Every embedded video comes from a teaching channel approved for School Launch, but YouTube shows its own recommendations and ads around them, so parents should preview the videos and stay nearby.