Story Mapping and Comprehension

Story- and character-mapping are techniques I use a lot with my students. We've done it to track how a Roman play works and what characters have to do with each other, and we've used it to keep track of the movements in a particularly confusing text, and we've used it to create a visual for how an epic flows.

Most recently, we've mapped the entirety of Jason and the Argonauts to think about the impact each character has on the journey.

Generally when I have them do this, my requirements are:

1. Put a bubble on your page for each character you're including.
2. Write a short summary of what that character is (for jason, for example, you might write heros, filius alcimedes, lanam auream eripere voluit). In lower level classes, this can be short phrases or even things lifted directly from the text. In upper level classes, it can, too! Or you can ask them to write something of their own devising.
3. Connect that circle by lines to any other character to whom they relate (for jason, that's a lot of lines. in a play, for example, the leno will have many fewer lines connecting him to many fewer people).
4. On the line, write how these characters interact/what their relationship is.

For Jason, I also asked them to include why that relationship was important. For example, Jason and gang wouldn't have gotten through the Symplegades without Phineus. That's an important bit to include on the line.

Other types of story maps:
-murals
-plot points
-when events lead to other complicated events
-detailing movement in a story that has a lot of it (think Cambridge stage 12)

I have fifty of these in my classroom, on account of all of my twos have done this for Jason, and they did it in pairs. These are great tools! For creating, for reference, and eventually for what we did this week: writing. I spread all fifty-someodd of them down the hallway and gave my kids their journals. They've been reading about Jason for a Long Time (tm) now, and so they had an hour. They could look at any story map they wanted to from any class period, move around however they wanted. And they wrote the story of Jason and the Argonauts, organized in any way that made sense to their brains, for an hour.

Every one of them.

It's not a bad assessment, either, and not a high-output one for those of you who are working with texts and TCI and trying to figure out how to assess in a way that's not rote memorization and also isn't high-output.

Re-reading activities

I know I often want my students to simply re-read a text to get as many reps as possible. Here are a couple ways we are doing that:

1. Bombus
Bombus is the buzzing sound made by bees in Latin. It's pleasantly onomatopoetic - choose whatever onomatopoeia you like.

1. Put students in pairs, and have them switch off reading sentences. If someone doesn't understand something in a sentence they've read, they should first ask their partner, and then you. (you can write the definition on the board, if you like, and refer other students to that as reading goes on.)

2. You have a couple options here.
a. If your text has good paragraphs, tell students that when they reach the end of the paragraph, one of them should shout bombus or tax or any other onomatopoeia you like. The one who doesn't shout the word has to summarize the section they've just read.
OR
b. If your text doesn't have good paragraphs (ours are often short, and so don't), you can ring a bell periodically. When you do, they compete to shout whatever onomatopoeia you've concocted. Again, whoever gets there second has to summarize the paragraph. Depending on the level, I may or may not ask them to do this target language. In Latin I and II, I often tell them "if you can do it in Latin, you should." This leaves the possibility for those who don't feel they can to still express their comprehension without the pressure to produce.

2. Fill in the Blank

This becomes, unexpectedly, hilarious pretty quickly.

Each student is going to need a copy of the text. You'll need one, too.

Round one: you read the text to them. When you stop, the whole class fills in the next word. You can stop as often as you like. Every couple sentences, stop and make sure they understand, circle, answer questions, etc.

Round two (optional): do this again in English. Some texts don't lend themselves well to that, but if you want to, read the text again in English. When you stop, the whole class fills in the missing English word - which might not come physically next in the sentence.

Round three: do round one again. But this time, when you stop, call a student's name. That student has to fill in the word. If the student doesn't supply it pretty readily, joyfully start over. (i like to immediately target the kids i know are a little less likely to be on, to sort of let them know i'm holding them responsible.) Once you've started over more than a couple times, it actually becomes a little hilarious. We applaud every paragraph or so that we make it through without starting over. It provides really, really good repetition of the text, especially if you're checking for comprehension as you go. (as always, repetition without comprehension is pointless.)

Tag-yourself memes

I don't know if you've seen tag-yourself memes on facebook. In general they're pretty hilarious.

Check it out:

A variation on read-and-draw with a gallery walk

My kids got a new text this week. I wanted them to read and visualize it together, as well as get in a few reps, and both have the opportunity to read and draw. I wanted comprehension high and forced output to be low. So:

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.

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!

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.

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.

Collective interview

I began with an idea from Martina Bex that can be found here.

A collective interview is a set of questions given to a group that is asked of the group in circuitu. The questions can all center around a topic, a grammatical structure, a set of vocabulary - or can be about completely random things. Up to you. People in the groups can answer as themselves or, as we did today, as a character.

We've been reading Tres Ursi, so we worked with that today.

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:

O Captain, My Captain

I got this idea from a department meeting and then tweaked it a little.

Because we're talking about monsters in Latin I, we spent yesterday telling the story of Bellerophon. We talked about Sthenoboea, Proetus, Iobates, Bellerophon and the Chimaera, the letter-writing, the law of xenia, et ita porro. We hired five actors and dressed them up, and we acted out in detail the whole story, which was hilarious. We also took the opportunity to review some body parts as we discussed what exactly it was the Sthenoboea liked about Bellerophon (turns out: his cheeks, his left hip, his eyebrows, and the backs of his knees).

Tuesdays in Latin III/IV

Every Tuesday in Latin III/IV, I like to find absurd pictures that relate to whatever we're talking about - a kid going crazy during a soccer game, my brother sneaking up on his best friend with a screwdriver, et ita porro. I ask the students to get into pairs and give them two minutes to answer a question. Some of the questions I've asked:

Blind Retell

This activity is based loosely on Betsy Paskvan's awesome Blind Retell. I like to do this after a Movie Talk because it provides an image with a distinct story attached with which all the students are already familiar. The ones have been watching, for example, Monsterbox (which is adorable, and if you've never seen it, I highly recommend it). I showed them them this screen shot:

What a unit looks like in my classroom, part 1

I've been asked to post some information about a Latin III/IV unit I'm doing right now, so here's what it looks like:

Last May, I asked my Latin II and III students to throw out some ideas of topics that interested them. They gave me a list of twenty-seven ranging from Roman-occupied Britain to fairy tales. Then they voted, we tallied the votes, and we ended up with:
magic
military
sports and games
mythology
fairy tales

Summaries and lies

My upper levels have been learning about magic recently. I love teaching with video clips, since (I'm referencing the delightful and amazing Evan Smith here) visual vocabularies are indispensable. The more we can provide kids with a visual representation of information, the better a handle on it they'll have. So I've shown them three video clips:

-Mickey Mouse from Fantasia, stealing the magician's hat and making the broom do all the work
-David Blaine doing card tricks for Harrison Ford and getting summarily ejected from his house (I highly recommend you google Real or Magic Harrison Ford David Blaine, and then, if you're going to show it to your students, stop it before Indy drops the F bomb)
-The great scene from Hocus Pocus when the witches turn Thackeray Binks into a cat so he can live forever with his guilt (wonderful opportunity to teach the kids pedicis aeternis - in eternal chains - if you've been looking for one of those :D)

If I had a superpower - visualizing stories

If I had a superpower, it would be this: I'd love to be able to hold out my hand and just project at will, in the air, images or videos of whatever I happen to be seeing in my mind's eye at the time.

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.

Rereading activities

In reading and re-reading stories, I'm constantly looking for ways for students to employ their creativity along with their understanding of the story. So far this week, we've engaged in three:

1. Students speed-dated. Each round, the group got a short section of the story and five comprehension questions, so by the time they'd 'dated' all ten people, they'd read the entire story and answered questions. This demands specific comprehension of the story itself.

2. Team questions (see my earlier post on this here) - students received a copy of the story and had to answer questions while pretending to be a character from the story from the perspective of that character. This gives them a structure within which to work, and therefore doesn't require them to come up with personal answers that they may not effectively be able to phrase, but allows for creativity within the context of the story.

3. We made use of two social websites, of which one is Craigslist and the other PostSecret. I prepared a PowerPoint in advance with examples of the types of ads I wanted them to create, and we went through and discussed the principles and purpose of each ad. I showed them:

1. Personals ads (My name is John, I'm six feet tall, I like dancing, and I'm looking for a friend who likes to talk and cook)
2. Missed Connections ads (I saw you at the Racetrac in Thornton yesterday, wearing a red coat and talking on the phone. I wanted to say something, but you walked away before I could. If you read this, email me)
3. PostSecret (a website where people make deep personal confessions of fears or bad past actions, etc., artistically displayed on a picture/collage/postcard, without a name. ex: I am afraid I love my daycare babies more than my own. I will never live up to the person I pretend to be on Facebook)

The kids chose two of the three ads and created their own artistic, aesthetically-pleasing versions of these types of ads for two chosen characters in the story. The ads require either a lot of description or spectacular brevity and demand at the same time that the students comprehend the characterization, and not just the contents of the story. It gives them a framework within which to work and allows them to practice relevant vocabulary and structures while not being constrained to the limits of the story.

Popplet and mind mapping

Mind mapping is a technique frequently used to bring up old ideas, associate ideas with each other, and organize thoughts by summarizing. Visual students frequently benefit from them. Today, my Latin four students ended a unit by using Popplet.com (which is free up to five mind maps!) to create medical mind maps. They chose from five separate topics: humors, cures, illnesses, viscera and parts afflicted. They added major subsets coming off the sides of the main topic.