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:

An activity for new vocabulary

This is not something I would do with a class that doesn't have a good sense of humor.

I wanted to introduce several new vocabulary words that didn't have much of a common thread between them. I was pressed for time, so telling a story wasn't an option, and I wanted context and a lot of repetition.

Some Uses for Gallery Walks

I love gallery walks - they get the kids out of their seats productively, let them move around and interact with their peers' work, and the movement between various stimuli keeps it novel. Here are some uses for them!

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.

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.

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:

Building on writing

I like to do a short writing activity where I pick a topic we've been working with and spend all week writing about it. On day one, the kids are asked to fill in the blanks in a sentence. On day two, the kids are asked to write one sentence about the topic. We share the sentences in class and circle them, and that way the kids hear everyone else's idea.

Haiku

I love haiku. I love haiku because I had an RA in college who, if you locked yourself out and required her keys, would make you write a haiku for her. I hated haiku then, but now I love it.

Actually I love haiku not because of my curmudgeonly RA, but because they use so few syllables, there is metric requirement but it is not complicated, and it's such a beautiful way of asking students to summarize something in very few words. They have to be very effective to make it work. You also have to practice this a lot with your students until they get good at it. Write many haiku (haikus? haikunes? haikua? what's more than one haiku?) with them.

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.

It's been a while - using one activity for many things

For those of us teaching multiple levels, it can feel like a struggle to come up with distinct lesson plans for each level. That isn't always necessary, though - many activities can be adapted to whatever level you want, up to and including literature. It just has to be embedded, and then you can keep the passages you're reading consistent throughout levels, scaffolding up appropriately with each level.

For example, last week my Latin III and IV students were reviewing some subjunctive and passive structures, while my twos are working on demonstratives and relatives - very different ideas. I wanted to do an interactive activity with both levels, but I didn't want to design two separate activities.

Team Windows - teacher break

I needed a break today. I shouldn't have, because I wasn't at school yesterday, but for whatever reason, teaching the day after you've been out is just enervating, so instead my kids provided comprehensible input to themselves. 

More CI Games

I know this is something I've mentioned before, but games seem so important. Kids love to play them, they're low-stress for us, and they break up our lessons nicely. We're always tempted to play games with the kids, but so often, games don't lend themselves well to a CI approach because they're either just fact recall, or they don't really lend themselves to actually understanding a concept. Running around is not always a good measure of understanding. :D

Jeopardy
I've been adapting Jeopardy recently to work better with a CI approach rather than a 'fact recall' game, and I have yet to have a class for whom it doesn't work.

This is a fairly high-output game for the kids, but it is limited by the types of questions they can ask, and it's also mitigated by the fact that students are working in groups. It also gives them some freedom in the sense that there may be various questions which can be answered by what you said.

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.