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.

Read and Draw

This is a summarization technique that I use with some regularity to great effect.

I am fortunate to own ten giant white boards (which can be gotten at CostCo or on Amazon), but this could just as easily be done with butcher paper, on the surface of a desk with whiteboard markers, or on 8.5x11 printer paper. This is a two-day activity.

Day one: I set up the desks in pairs facing each other. Each student was armed with a copy of a familiar passage, and each PAIR had a giant whiteboard and marker. This began almost as a popcorn reading. The first partner read a line to the second partner, who drew a picture and did NOT erase it. The second partner then read the second line and the other one drew it. The goal was, at the end, to have the entire passage illustrated.

Using Synonyms to Understand a Text

I don't know under what skill we might file this (speaking? circumlocution? summarizing? understanding a reading? all or none of the above?), but this was something I did with my students today and thought I'd share.

My threes are reading the beginning of Genesis, and it's fairly legible, but there are some phrases that throw them off. They're also having some difficulty summarizing in their own words because it's written succinctly, and because let's face it, talking can be a difficult skill to acquire. What we did today worked well for us, and I think it's something I will try again.

I'm posting it here because I've found that it's of enormous benefit to me when I spend time finding ways to say the same thing variously. When we do it with a class, you also get the benefit of your students hearing things from each other that they hadn't come up with themselves. It's not heavy production, but it does ask them to pull and then pool their language skills to consider other methods of expressing themselves and expressing certain ideas.

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.

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:

Locutiones Latinae

I have found in my journey in Latin speaking that the most difficult thing for me (other than, good heavens, convoluted clauses within clauses) has by far been speaking Latin. We tend, especially as tirones, to start speaking English but using Latin words. It's a really easy thing to do, and it's a harder thing to do to start acquiring real Latin. I don't mean to sound like a broken record, but hours and hours and hours of input is the only real way to do that - for us or for our students. Sometimes, though, a list of nice idioms can help, so I'm putting forth a small list here of idioms I've found to be useful, ways we can start saying things more Latinly, if you will - either with our students or simply ourselves.

Tables and Chairs

I am in the process of acquiring card tables. Last year I decided to get rid of my desks and was very happy with the decision. My feeling at the time was that desks encourage kids to feel restrained, as though they have to be right all the time and as though they must stifle their creativity. We train our students that the goal is to be correct, rather than to make progress, and to do it right rather than trying out a lot of different ways. Students have learned to ask teachers the question 'how do you want me to do this?' rather than asking themselves 'how many ways can I do this?'. Desks, for me, were a symbol of that manifesto, so my goal in getting rid of the desks was to create a community learning feeling where students did not feel restrained behind a wood desk, but rather were immediately in contact with the rest of the classroom community. Furthermore, I wanted room in the middle of the classroom where students could practice plays, run relays, and do large group activities that hadn't been possible when there were desks.