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:

Why I'm Not Warning My Kids About Tests

Last year, I decided to stop giving my students warnings about when they were going to be tested, and I'm just giving assessements impromptu. Possibly more importantly, I also don't tell them that it is a test.

At the very beginning, the kids were really suspicious, and my administrator warned me that there was going to be blowback from parents, but I never heard a peep from a single parent. And what actually happened with the kids was this:

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:

Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes

I love doing assessments wherein the assessment is itself a form of input. We've been learning about body parts, among other things, in Latin I. We've labeled kids with duct tape, created facsimilia of people, discussed monsters, et ita porro. We now know - because to an extent, I let the kids drive which body parts they want to know - some unusual body parts, including eyebrows, backs of knees, back of neck and chin.

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).

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.

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: