Summarization activity

I was at an immersion program this summer, and I was playing an ongoing game with a good friend of mine from Australia. One of us would tell a story with several details to the other. The other would then have time to think about the story and, when ready, would retell the story in one sentence. We were practicing periodic sentences and subordinating clauses. It was entertaining and also surprisingly helpful.

So today with my Latin III/IV students, I handed out pictures of monsters to them. There were nine kinds of monsters (gorgons, sea monsters, unicorns, dragons, etc), and the first thing they did was silently, for five minutes, write in their journal about the monster they had. Then I asked some of them which monster they had, and as a class we talked a little bit about each monster. When I hit on one (and it varied by class) that the students knew about and could describe and found interesting, we established a list of facts about the creature. Some of these were made up (apparently there are six harpies, of which three are dangerous and three are nice), and others were legitimately facts about the monsters (Medusa is a gorgon, and she is snakey-haired). Then we circled the information. Circling is a TPRS technique intended to get in repetitions (although it is absolutely not the only way to get in repetitions) and, to a certain degree, check comprehension. For example:



Is Medusa a gorgon?
Yes.
Of course! Medusa is a gorgon! Is Medusa a gorgon or a dragon?
A gorgon.
Certainly Medusa is a gorgon. Is Medusa a hydra?
No.
Of course not! Medusa is a gorgon! What is Medusa?
A gorgon.
Yes. Medusa is a gorgon.

Having circled and made ourselves certain of the information (which involved a large number of facts), I asked them to find a partner and to create (either by simply discussing or by writing it down) one sentence in which all the facts were included. We talked about what words might be useful to them in doing this (quoque, et, sed, tamen, nihilominus, quod, ut, qui/quae/quod*), and then I gave them ten minutes to come up with a sentence.

Then I asked for volunteers to read the sentences. I checked for understanding and answered questions, and then I had the readers stand up. The class applauded for the sentence they liked best. This in all ways turned into an effort by each team to get the most noise, which became entertaining. I would not have done this with younger years because they don't know each other as well - these students are comfortable with each other, and so it didn't become an issue of being self-conscious. Several of the sentences were very simple and included a lot of the word et. Others were very complex and really, really nice. Still others were just funny. It varied, but it also got them back into thinking about writing things in longer sentences.