Encountering a text - reading variation

My IIs have been finishing up Petronius' versipellis story - we divided it into three chapters. We've done a lot of prereading activities (micrologues, dictations, vocab activities, listen and draw, etc), and now they're ready to sit down and read the text. They voted to do this in groups.

So here's how we did it:

Students choose, or are put in, groups of three - whatever works for your particular bunch. Some of my classes self-group well, and others...less so. :) You know how it goes.

They designate person A, B, and C (or if you're my kids, rock/paper/scissors, servus/miles/melissa, anas/ananas/pudor...whatever works for y'all...). I project the first sentence of the text, with some questions following, on a PowerPoint slide. For example:

Melissa mea: "Lupus," inquit, "villam intravit et, petens omnia pecora tamquam lanius, sanguinem illis misit."
Quis fabulam narrat?
Quomodo lupus pecora petivit?
Quis sanguinem misit?
Cuius sanguis missus est?

Person A reads the sentence. Person B asks a question - this can be one of my questions I've projected, or they can come up with their own question. Person C answers the question.

They turn their attention to me again, and we walk through the sentence so everyone's on the same page, and we share questions and answers.

I project sentence two, also with questions. Now they switch roles: B reads the sentence, C asks, A answers. It goes like this in circuitu until they have finished reading the text.

This works well with short texts, or you can provide them with their own copy of the text with questions written in so that groups can go at their own pace instead of turning back to the class each time.

It forces the kids to stop after every sentence to really process what's going on; it scaffolds the questions for them so they don't have to formulate their own, but they can if they wish; and it asks them to focus on each thing that happens so they don't get lost in the middle, which can easily happen when they're encountering a new text. Let me know if it works for you, and what changes you make!

Auto-audio-dictation (a variation on a running dictation)

This year I have a high-flying Latin III student in a very, very behind Latin II class. If I thought I was going to be able to ask them to level up for him, I'd be integrating him, but they can't, and I can't in good conscience ask him to sit through Latin II again. So instead, I'm making use of flipgrid and seesaw (at the suggestion of the great Ginny Lindzey) - more on those later - to essentially give him the lessons I'm teaching in class, but online.

Y'all, my classroom looks different now: flexible seating

This is my fifth year deskless! I distinctly remember myself, a colleague, and a student carrying desks out of my room to a trailer. We got our workout that day. We've had chairs for the last four years - just chairs - but this year I'd been reading a lot about flexible seating, and I got to thinking:

FVR, an update

I completely revamped my classroom this year - look out for a post on flexible seating - and that's meant revamping FVR a little, too.

In the last year, there's been a huge boom of easier readers, so of course I went on a spending spree and bought a bunch of them. I have Quot Animalia, Quid Edam, Brando Brown, Filia Regis et Monstrum Horribile, most of Lance Piantaggini's books, Iter Mirabilis Dennis et Debrae, Cattus Petasatus, Olivia, Ritchie's Fabulae Facies, Vesuvius iand other Plays, Itinera Petri, and many others.

Running in Circles, and a new friend

First, a new friend

I'm pleased to say that I will be sharing my blog with my friend and excellent Latin teacher up in Erie, PA, Eric Mentges. Eric teaches from the Orberg Lingua Latina book. He is also deskless, and, unlike me, has an AP class. I'm excited to be sharing this space, and also to be widening the perspectives we can share. Keep an eye out - I'm hoping our next post will be from Eric. We'll be tagging our posts with our names so you can look for specific people, if you wish.

A short list of handy-dandy brain breaks we've been doing and have liked

Brain breaks are an incredibly useful tool in the classroom, especially (god sixth period, or first period) when your kids are full or fidgety - and you can do them target language. Here's a short list of ones I've done so far this year that have worked for me. Let me know if there are any you do, too, that work, and I'll put 'em on the list!

Angeli et Diaboli

I got this years ago from a workshop with Jason Fritze. It's the Peruvian (?! Jason, correct me!) version of tag, I think.

I own several giant white boards, so I use one of them for my demonstration, but you could just as easily use paper. I write on it:

Uses for Small White Boards

Here are a collection of posts I've made on what to do with small white boards if you have them, plus a little extra!

Things That Foreign Language Teachers Need To Do More

There are a lot of things that push us to get better as language teachers, and many of them are things we forget we can do, or forget to incorporate on a regular basis. The ideas listed below are either things I've done to great success or have seen other people do with great success, and that I think really need to happen more.

Project based learning as a performance final

At my high school, we're required to give written and spoken performance finals in addition to our objective multiple-choice finals. I'm a huge advocate for authentic assessment and have never loved the idea of kids recording into a void on what they call 'mind-control devices' (the language lab). I think the lab absolutely has its place, but when it comes to spoken assessment, I want them to have interaction, encouragement, be able to ask questions, and show off to whatever extent they can. I also want it to be fluid, low-pressure, fun, and forgiving - and most of all, authentic.

On Fidget Tools

I have a small basket of fidget tools - a couple of cubes with various sides (one that clicks, one that rolls, etc), some tubes with marbles in, some metal interconnected rings, a plastic twisty thing, a silicon thing you can stick your fingers in, and a couple spinners. They were all pretty cheap (so's the quality, if we're going to be honest) - I got them for a dollar each at wish.com, which means it took thirty years for them to get here, but that's okay. I'm doing a dry run.

See, I think the fidget tools are actually really important. A few years ago, I let a kid borrow my kombaloi beads I got in Greece because he could. not. focus. unless he was playing with something, and when he had those, his attention span got longer, his participation level went up, and his grades went through the roof. He just had too much body to deal with, so once he chilled his body out, his mind could work. It was great.

And then the fidget toys happened. I say toys intentionally, because although they are tools, I have a lot of kids who just like playing with them (which I get - so do I), but they became a huge distraction in class. Kids passing them around, throwing them, getting up in the middle of class to show them to other people.

So I put my basket of fidget tools out last week, and my classes and I had a very serious conversation, and they seem to be respecting it so far. We'll see how it goes next year with the new crop of children coming in. But here is the gist of it, and why it is so important to me (it is important to note that focus issues/mental illness/etc and physical disabilities should not be equated, but in this circumstance, I think it's helpful for students who have trouble conceptualizing what a real focus issue might be to give them a disability they can immediately imagine):

I said, guys, imagine that one of your legs is much shorter than the other, and so every time you stand, your hip hurts and you cannot run and play, and you also cannot do things the same way other people do. You are at a real disadvantage, and that is not your fault. It's just that you're in pain, and you are unable to get around it to do the other things you have to.

But then someone hands you a cube, and you can put your foot on that cube, strap it right on, and then your hip doesn't hurt anymore. You can suddenly do things that you could not before.

But then everyone likes your cube, so then everyone has a cube, which is great until they start throwing them or playing with them or getting shiny ones with flashing lights. Teachers get fed up with this, and they start taking them away, because classroom distractions don't help. Eventually, there's a classroom-wide and maybe school-wide ban on them because they're so distracting. And this is fine - kids might be annoyed that they can't play with the thing, but they'll get over it. It isn't a big deal.

Except you. Because you needed that block to be able to do things like anyone else does, and now the only real tool that was helping you do that is something you can't have anymore, so you'll go back to being in pain and two steps behind.

There are students who actually need the fidget tools, people who have trouble focusing their minds or controlling their behavior without something to focus their physical energy into. When you disrespect the tools they use to help them with that and appropriate them as your toys, you put their very real coping tools at risk. If you are disrespecting those tools and using them such that they are a distraction, you are part of the possible outcome that they get taken away, and then that the people who need them lose a tool that's very important to them and their success. Please don't jeopardize someone else's success.

Anyone who wishes to use the fidgets may. Even people who don't need them can benefit from them, and I'm a fan of that. I am not going to restrict access to them. But if I catch you disrespecting them, you will personally lose access to them so that the people who need them don't. Thank you for contributing to the community of this classroom by making sure that everyone has access to all the tools they might need to succeed in their learning and in their lives.

The Latin iPad

My colleague Natalie and I came into the windfall of an iPad when my grandmother decided to update hers. She was going to get rid of it, so we asked for it so we could have a dedicated Latin department iPad.

And we have made great and joyous use of it.

Some things so far this year that I highly recommend:

Uses for OWATs

OWATs - or One Word at a Time stories - are the brainchild of Bob Patrick. Essentially, their purpose is to allow students to be creative and write their own stories within the confines of vocabulary that you want them to use. One vocab word is passed out to each group, and they have to write a sentence with that word. Bob then has them switch cards with another finished group so they can write their next sentence, continuing the story.

I found that if I waited for enough groups to be done for that, the chances that a group would be sitting around doing nothing - because either (a) no other group was done soon enough or (b) the group that was done had a word the other group had already gotten - was much higher.

Using language classes to teach other ideas

Every year for the last six years, I've sat down with my twos and threes and asked what they want to study curricularly the following year. Then I spend the summer putting together that curriculum. This year, for the first time, a student suggested the American Civil War. It didn't get voted for, so that won't be part of our curriculum next year, but it did spark a really interesting conversation about the things that are reasonable to learn in a Latin class.

The answer is: anything. It's a language, so we can talk about anything we want to. In the last year, we've done science experiments and hypotheses (Celsus proposes a lot of cures for a lot of things, so we hypothesized what they would actually do, and then we tried them all and kept notes on our experiments, comparisons, etc.), math (if we know how many people are in a contubernium and century, etc., can we figure out how many people are in a cohort?), history, reading, and art. I try very hard to touch on all the school subjects as often as I can.

Materials

Small update:

If you check the materials section, you'll see that the three existing gorgeous chapters of Hobbitus Ille, by Anthony Gibbins, are there. You should also go check out Legonium, also one of Anthony's masterpieces, with its sheltered vocab, great storylines, and beautiful pictures.

If you are NOT currently a member of the Teaching Latin for Acquisition facebook group, I highly recommend it. The beautiful Ellie Arnold (Helena) is administrating a database of an incredible number of readings and activities for CI Latin teachers.

Duck Duck Goose

We started out with anas anas anser.
By the end of the game, in various classes, we had anus anus ananas, anas anas ananas, and my favorite: ananas ananas pudor.

We played duck duck goose much like you do, with one twist - the student defending their seat had to answer a question. The students chased each other around the circle, and the first student to sit down (or to tag the other student) had to answer a question, Latine, in order to keep the seat. If they got it WRONG, the other student got to answer the question and could steal the seat. If BOTH got it wrong, the original student sat in the middle, and the other student had to duck-duck-goose everyone. It was simple, low-prep, and hilarious. I highly recommend it.

QR scavenger hunt

I read the excellent Keith Toda's version of this and was inspired to try my own. Essentially, you create QR codes with information and clues encoded in them, paste them up around the school, and empower the kids to use a QR reader or snapchat (which has one in its camera function!) to go on a scavenger hunt for the information.

I wanted them to do a review over theater information, but I didn't want to just play a review game - I also wanted them getting input. So I typed up a short text and used this QR code generator to create each of my codes. I created an A track, a B track, and a C track for each group by dividing each sentence into three fragments (see below).

Reading pictionary

The kids love pictionary, and I like finding excuses to get them to read and reread without making it too obvious that that's what I'm doing. :)

Something I like to do as a result:

I divide the class into three teams and ask for one volunteer from each team. Those three volunteers sit at the front of the room with their backs to the board, and the rest of my students get a mini-whiteboard and marker. But instead of the traditional 'now everyone draw a picture of the word I'm about to write,' those three get a copy of a story they know well instead.

A rereading game

Martina Bex created this gorgeous game called es posibile. I did (almost) nothing but translate it into Latin, beginning with fierine potest? ludus legendi.

The rules are pretty simple: Kid A draws a card, which has a statement on it. The student has to read the statement aloud, and then determine whether it's possible based on the text. If the sentence is possible, the kid moves forward; if not, backward. Rinse and repeat with kid B.

Designing a Unit Around Culture

Last summer, a friend of mine said something that really stuck with me. He told me that language is culture, and that we have to examine our reasons for teaching kids certain cultural things. Do we just want them to have the information? If so, just tell them. But if we want them to be able to discuss that information, they have to have it in the target language. So with that in mind, I wanted to teach theater this year, and I wanted to do it in the target language.

So I designed an entire unit around theater. One of the dangerous parts of topical units is we teach a bunch of specialized vocabulary (like greaves?!) that never gets used again. So when I do this, I try to pick vocabulary to focus on that I think is going to be useful universally. When we did magic, we acquired 'sermone secreto' and "pallent superi," each of which phrases was present in the reading, but has been otherwise useful for communicating. In medicine, we learned 'iuvamen vitae' and 'ex consuetudine.' While it's true that we also talked about livers and some random measurements, those have not been the major vocabulary focuses - the culture-specific words have become icing words, more or less.