Self-Identification, Practicing Phrases, and Discretion

My ones are learning about family. In the course of learning about family every year, I sit down and have a conversation with my kiddos. In it, I tell them that we're going to be discussing things like parents and siblings and familial relationships, and that they get to define their families however they want to. If they have people in their lives they aren't blood-related to but they think of as family, that's a-ok by me. If they have a sister but don't like her, and they don't want to disclose that they have that sister, fine by me. They can disclose or not disclose whatever they want, include or exclude whatever is meaningful to them. I think that's a really important conversation to have, since

(a) it emphasizes the value of their autonomy,
(b) reminds them that we see/respect them as people before anything else and
(c) asks them to be respectful of everyone else in the room and their autonomy as well. Also,
(d) it doesn't call anyone out. When I was in high school, my feelings about my family were very complicated, and there are things I wouldn't have wanted to answer. When we give them power to make that call on their own and don't put them in a position to have to say things they don't want to talk about, we emphasize that that's something we value.

On which note...

Here's an activity I love.

I really want a lot of reps of potius quam, malo, conor, soleo, debeo and possum with my ones at the moment.

So I wrote on the board ______________ potius quam _____________ malo.

I indicated myself and said, coquere potius quam currere malo. Any kids who feel the same way were supposed to stand. You then have options: acknowledge that there are a lot/a few, call on a couple and ask some questions (what do you like to cook? have you ever tried running?), or just acknowledge it and have them sit.

I made a few similar statements. i prefer to eat breakfast rather than lunch. Etc. Then I started calling on kids, and they'd make statements. Wearing Vans vs Jordans. Petting cats vs petting dogs.

Then I changed the phrase: ______________ conor, sed non bene possum. 

Cantare, I said, conor, sed non bene possum. (they made me demonstrate, and then they agreed.) Some stood, some didn't, we discussed. Then they made statements about themselves (voluntarily), and those who identified with those statements stood.

This is a great icebreaker, warm-up, bell-ringer, end of class and I have ten minutes kind of activity. You can do it to introduce something, to get reps of an idea, etc. And because kids really like to talk about themselves, it doesn't get boring. Change up your statements and keep them novel, and it gets everybody involved. This is good material for a quick quiz at the end of class if you spend time really using this to do PQA. This is also great fodder for PQA (either in the moment or later).

And there are endless things you could ask them to talk about. Just today:

______________ possum, sed me non delectat.
_______________ potius quam ____________ malo.
_____________ habere volo, sed non habeo.
______________ conor, sed non bene possum.
______________ debeo, sed non soleo.
______________ mihi est.

Practicing indirect statement

Indirect statements can be tough for the kids to get a hang of - it requires verb shifts and an interesting understanding of time relativity. We know, though, that comprehensible, compelling repetition is what helps us acquire language, so with that in mind, here are some ways we've practiced indirect speech:

1. I put a silly sentence on the board. Students are in groups. We circle the sentence and make sure students understand what is going on. I give them a subject and a head verb (like "Paulus memoria tenuit), and their job is to turn the whole thing into an indirect statement (e.g. "Paulus Claram infantes quaerere memoria tenuit"). When the group feels they've got it, a runner goes to the center of the room, where I have put a bell, to ding the bell. The whole class stops talking and listens. The student gives us their sentence. If they're right, we applaud, I ask some questions, sometimes we act it out, and we move on to the next sentence.

2. The class is divided into five groups. Each group has as many small white boards as the number of people in their group...plus one. On the extra white board...
-group one makes a list of accusative nouns.
-group two makes a list of infinitives.
-group three makes another list of accusative nouns.
-group four makes a list of ablative nouns.
-group five makes a list of things you can do with your brain.

I ask a student who is going to be in this sentence, and they typically offer me something entertaining (Magnus Pater, Iohannes Cena, etc). Then I consult each group in turn for a word of their variety. Eventually we end up with what's basically a constructed madlib that looks like this...

Magnus Pater regem devoravisse carcerem oculis censuit. 

We make sure everyone understands the sentence, and then each person on their own board draws the sentence. We show our boards, and I take individual boards and show them. One of the things I like to do with this is point at the parts of the picture and have the kids tell me what part of the sentence that is, such that we end up reconstructing the sentence together.

Rinse and repeat.

I've also done this with lines out of poetry and just removed certain forms, such that the line of poetry basically becomes a mad lib.

3. The kids get a sentence form, like: ______________ (aliquis) ____________________ (aliquid) proposuit, sed __________________ (aliquis) ___________________ (aliquid) sprevit.

This sentence form is under a picture. Groups work together to fill in the blanks to describe what's going on in the picture. (the link goes to a powerpoint i recently used for this.)

Addition: I sometimes give a quiz that goes along with this, while we're doing this. After we've done each picture, I ask one or two questions about what has been established to have happened in that picture.

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.

You and I

One of the things my kids struggle with is you and I, particularly in the perfect tense. This year I've decided to spend a lot of time on conversational exchange, particularly about events in the past, particularly in the first and second person. Here are some things I've done:

Practicing the Past Tense

I generally hold off on the past tense until the second year to give the kids some real time to get comfortable with the present. I use it all the time, but I don't 'actively teach' it.

So we've just begun it. Some of the more difficult things are:

1. remembering the weirdness with forms, especially since the patterns aren't necessarily immediately noticeably consistent.
2. visualizing the purposes for each of those tenses.
3. hearing the purposes of each of those tenses.

So to combat those, I did the following:

Oh, no! Poor Joe!

There's a great scene in the movie Dave (Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver, if you've never seen it, there are your weekend plans; you're welcome) when Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver are visiting a homeless shelter. The kids are playing a game called Oh No Poor Joe. All the kids chant oh, no! Poor Joe! He has no...
and then the facilitator shows them a picture of a body outline missing one part. The kids identify the part all together. This is also a spectacular language learning tool. I can see a lot of purposes for it (including simple identification of body parts), but I've been using it for genitives.

Mettius Fufetius in rounds

Mettius Fufetius is a re-do of the Spanish game Pancho Comancho. In Pancho Comancho, five or so students are called to the front of the room and given white boards. You can do this with any structure you want, so imagine we're doing it with adjectives. On one is written purple, on one 'tall,' on one 'angry,' on one 'sick' and on one 'sleepy.' The teacher asks a question of one student: Is Pancho Comancho tall? and starts a timer (I usually do one minute for the first round). That student says, "No, Pancho Comancho is not tall; Pancho Comancho is ________ (any of the other adjectives on any other board)." It then becomes a game of verbal hot potato. The student speaking when the timer goes off has to sit down.

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.

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.)

Dear Abby

One of my classes and I have been spending time on you should, also known as jussive subjunctives. They've been proposing things for each other to do for the last several days, so today we brought it to a head in talking about our own problems.

I gave each student two small squares of paper.

If you have a paper guillotine, one of the best things I keep in my classroom is squares of paper guillotined from stuff in the recycled paper bin. We use them for warm-ups, quick quizzes, and any manner of things that don't require a full sheet.

On the first sheet, they wrote about a problem they have - my boyfriend doesn't love me, my history grade is bad, I hate physics, my brother won't give me the car.

Imperfect and Perfect Tenses

For the last several years, I've been using a translation technique to teach the imperfect and perfect tenses. Because they have implications that exist but are rarely actively noticed in English, I have found that calling attention to them in English first tends to result in them sticking more closely in the kids' understanding. Furthermore, by the end of it, the story is entirely in the target language, so the students have a thorough understanding of the story because they've heard it in English several times, but they are eventually only processing it in Latin.

They Don't Notice, plus how we treat grammar

One of the big questions that always comes up for people new to the idea of CI (and, if we're being honest, probably to the people who do it a lot, too) is with regard to sheltering. I have yet to see a textbook (actually, the only book in Latin that I have seen that does this is one that was pointed out by Bob Patrick - it's Tres Ursi, a Latin version of the three bears) that effectively keeps vocab down but goes hog wild with the grammar.

We have this concept that students will not understand what we're saying if we use grammar they don't know. There is only a certain degree to which that's true. But they absolutely won't understand if we use a lot of vocabulary they don't know. People don't have the ability to truly absorb thirty-five vocabulary words in a day or two. They just don't. And when we start throwing around stories and lectures and texts and such that are chock full of words they don't know, we lose them. The textbook I use introduces words like swamp once and then never uses them again, forcing kids either to go hunting in the dictionary or, at the minimum, to interrupt their reading to look at the glossary at the bottom of the page. Swamp is a fabulous word! But it's not repeated enough, it's not relevant to what they're doing, and so all it really serves to do is disrupt them.