A unit in my classroom, part 2

All the stuff that we more or less pulled off in five days - and it did actually take a little longer than that, because on Friday, they'd earned lots of PAT, so we only had eight minutes of class - is easily stretchable into two weeks. In some of my upper level classes, it did take longer, and we just took our time with it and enjoyed ourselves.

Friday, the eight minutes of class essentially amounted to the weather and days of the week. After that we played Versipellis. I need to post on Versipellis, because it is the best game I know, and the kids are obsessed with it (credit to Keegan Potter for it). Friday, therefore, is not included in my plans, so day 5 is really day six...and actually is going to be day seven, and you'll see why below:




By the end of all this, my children had earned 52 minutes of PAT, and I have promised them that when they earn 52 minutes of PAT, we will celebrate Kindergarten Day. So Monday was Kindergarten Day, and we picked up the thread of knowing more stuff about magic no Tuesday. Monday, by a stroke of chance, was also Volcano Day (Aug 24 - we'll celebrate again in October), so the kids insisted that we read a book about volcanoes.

There are no children's stories in Latin about volcanoes.

So I spent my lunch period reading through as many elementary school-level books as I could find (courtesy of Amazon's look inside feature!), and I chose the one that (a) had an interesting story and (b) was sparse enough that I could viably translate it without them getting lost. I showed it to a kid, and she felt that she was sufficiently fascinated. It is episode sixteen of the Imagination Station, and it's called Doomsday in Pompeii. I spent Sunday translating the first two chapters. There are parts I've cut out - just because they're strictly not necessary, and primarily entertaining to seven-year-olds, and would serve more to confuse my kids than anything else - and I have made a concerted effort to use the structures and vocabulary I'm teaching my kids anyway in the translation. Very handy.

So on Kindergarten Day, they brought cookies and their pillows/blankets/snugglies/whatever, and I brought my electric kettle, and they made hot chocolate and tea and flopped on the floor. I read to them from the book. We did bits where we acted stuff out, there is a storm near the end of chapter one (so one kid banged on the cabinet while a bunch of kids tapped on their legs to make rain noises and a kid messed with the lights to make lightning), I hired a kid to be noisemaker, and we did a lot of drawing, circling and questioning. It was essentially just like story-telling - we don't ever stop checking for comprehension or involving the kids just because it's a different format.

I got really positive feedback from them afterwards, plus some suggestions:

1. hook up the doc cam and ask someone to draw some of the more complicated parts
2. make sure that we go back over what happened the next time we have Kindergarten Day.

This allowed us to take an interlude, digest everything we'd been learning by hearing it in context without focusing on it, and tell a nice story - have a break.

Part three up probably this weekend!