A Queen of Monsters, or, on the importance of phrases

I have a small confession, which is that I once forgot that 88 in Latin is not expressed as eighty-eight but rather as two-from-ninety and accidentally taught my kids the wrong number, and did so in a phrase that gets repeated a lot, such that my embarrassment is fairly palpable at this point. Especially since I eventually came back from my flight of fancy, remembered, confessed my sin, and now get ribbed a lot for it. And then we took performance finals, and one of my kids said it, absent-mindedly, anyway.

Which only serves to illustrate my point.

Haiku

I love haiku. I love haiku because I had an RA in college who, if you locked yourself out and required her keys, would make you write a haiku for her. I hated haiku then, but now I love it.

Actually I love haiku not because of my curmudgeonly RA, but because they use so few syllables, there is metric requirement but it is not complicated, and it's such a beautiful way of asking students to summarize something in very few words. They have to be very effective to make it work. You also have to practice this a lot with your students until they get good at it. Write many haiku (haikus? haikunes? haikua? what's more than one haiku?) with them.

Go Fish

Almost every kid I've ever met can play Go Fish (I say almost because it turns out I have one student who's never played, so there goes the assumption that every child knows this game), and they enjoy, if for no other reason than (I'm quoting a student here), "it's fun, it's not really competitive, and there's no pressure or timing and you don't really feel like you're losing." It's also really great for repeating the same vocabulary words and descriptions over and over again, as well as reviewing plot points in a story.

I've been doing MovieTalk with my twos, with a video every kid who's ever seen it hates because it hits them in, as they say, the feels. They never forget it, though. It's a 5:33 short called Changing Batteries. It's really beautifully done and lends itself to all kinds of vocabulary and structures - I highly suggest you watch it.

Cobbled Sentences

This is an activity I love to do, but it's important to be very careful about how we do it lest it either
a. make so little sense as to no longer be comprehensible input or
b. be repetitive enough as to no longer be compelling.

Cobbling sentences is essentially the creation of mad lib sentences out of elements the students created and then mixed up - thus why it can stop making sense if you're not careful. On the other hand, it is also frequently hilarious, and thus compelling.

Students write a sentence with certain elements included in it. Today, it was present and perfect participles. For example:

Marcus, saltans, puerum vexatum spectat. (Marcus, dancing, watches the boy who got annoyed.)