Since Grade 4 students will not be reading Borchert's play, they are pre-reading in the curricular sense -- being prepared conceptually and linguistically for a text to which they willbe exposed at a future point in their German language learning.

     Consequently, both Exercise A and B try to address the communications standards, by focusing largely on how one might express in another language concepts used in English.  Conceivably, Exercise A might also serve the connections standards by linking other disciplines (history) and expression in German.

     Praiseworthy for both exercises from the perspective of the Standards is the fact that neither demandd more than single sentence comprehension or usage by students, an realistic expectation about the discursive capabilities of ten year olds.  If you chose Exercise B, it was because it is superior to exercise A in presenting concrete rather than abstract ideas and by offering two minimal variants of the same conceptual pattern.  B prepares students first to see a dichotomy and then to express it using the "ein / kein" distinction.  On these two counts, then, B is the preferable choice when measured according to appropriateness for Grade 4 cognitive capabilities, and for Grade 4 preparation for language communication.

     If you chose Exercise A, you may have been influenced by the fact that the vocabulary to be introduced is, indeed, central to Borchert's play.  The caveat we stress here, however, is that all of the central ideas proposed as exercise items are abstract.  They are neither cognitively nor experientially within the range of most young students in the United States.  Consequently, these words are less likely to be well understood and memorable to a ten year old than are the very tangible words stressed in Exercise B.

     Further, to execute Exercise A, the teacher must rely on a fairly sophisticated grasp of historical events, probably beyond the range of Grade 4 students -- it is likely to turn into an exercise in fact-finding, rather than in communication.  Thus, although the learning task for Exercise B involves cognitive synthesis of two linguistic factors (conjugation of "tragen," use of negation) in addition to possibly new vocabulary, it represents a pre-reading task more appropriate for a Grade 4 cognitive level.  The fact that the teacher will be using various forms of the verb tragen need not pose cognitive overload for young children as long as they need only repeat the form uttered by the teacher (Teacher: "Trägt Jimmie eine Brille?" Respondent: "Ja [nein], Jimmie trägt eine [keine] Brille".  To answer any question, then, students need only make one linguistic decision, not two; the teacher has set up the cognitive problem clearly, allowing for the possibility that some fourth graders may draw conclusions about what makes a member of an "in-group."