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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

Games Your Students Play - Concentration 64

I have several students who spend their lunchtimes in my room, and I like to watch them and see what games they play, either verbally or on their phones, in their downtime. It tells me what they like to do, and that means I can sometimes design activities around the things they do in their free time. Our students are always more willing to do something compelling to them, and nothing is more compelling than stuff they do in their lives of their own volition. When we can incorporate our students' lives into our classrooms, we not only interest our students further, lending to their progress and buy-in, but we become more in tune with them as people, too. Something some of my older students like to do is a clapping categories game called Concentration 64 that lends itself BEAUTIFULLY to a language class.