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Today in the 7th grade classes we read almost the entire story of Sulla in Stage 11 using the reading card and metaphrasing SOMEONE VERBED SOMETHING TO/FOR SOMEONE.
This was really, really good for reinforcing dative vs accusative endings.
We started by going more or less one word at a time, and then I would give them two at a time, so they'd have something like MARCUS SULLAE... or MARCUS FRATRI... and they'd have to supply Marcus verbed something to Sulla or Marcus verbed something to his brother. Forced them to really, really look at endings.
OH, and there were PLENTY of omitted nominatives with sentences starting with ACCUSATIVES. For instance, I remember one started DUOS TITULOS and they started with "two slogans..." NO NO!!! Look at the endings and now metaphrase it correctly. Then I would get "Someone verbed two slogans." I would also point out that if a sentence is starting with an accusative, then the nominative must be understood, and if it is understood, that means it's whatever the nominative was in the last sentence (i.e. he/Sulla).
The warm-up before vocab drill and the reading consisted of four short sentences, two with regular verbs, one with credit, one with favet and asking them to pick the correct object (e.g. Holconio or Holconium) depending upon the verb. I'm going to do the same tomorrow, except with pronouns. We spent a bit of time talking about credit and favet again, so that when we were metaphrasing and we went from a "Marcus verbs something to Holconius" to "Marcus favors Holconius" (because favet takes a dative) no one had a problem.
It would NOT be worthwhile to use a reading card with every story, but you MUST slow the students down once a stage, I think, to make them really THINK about the ENDINGS. Otherwise, the stories are so well written that it is easy to anticipate what comes next. And is that bad? No, that's what good reading/writing is all about. Think about how FAST you read a good novel that's so well-written that you're just INTO THE STORY. And why shouldn't Latin be that way? It should. But we MUST slow our students down to insure that they also get what the morphology is all about.
This was really, really good for reinforcing dative vs accusative endings.
We started by going more or less one word at a time, and then I would give them two at a time, so they'd have something like MARCUS SULLAE... or MARCUS FRATRI... and they'd have to supply Marcus verbed something to Sulla or Marcus verbed something to his brother. Forced them to really, really look at endings.
OH, and there were PLENTY of omitted nominatives with sentences starting with ACCUSATIVES. For instance, I remember one started DUOS TITULOS and they started with "two slogans..." NO NO!!! Look at the endings and now metaphrase it correctly. Then I would get "Someone verbed two slogans." I would also point out that if a sentence is starting with an accusative, then the nominative must be understood, and if it is understood, that means it's whatever the nominative was in the last sentence (i.e. he/Sulla).
The warm-up before vocab drill and the reading consisted of four short sentences, two with regular verbs, one with credit, one with favet and asking them to pick the correct object (e.g. Holconio or Holconium) depending upon the verb. I'm going to do the same tomorrow, except with pronouns. We spent a bit of time talking about credit and favet again, so that when we were metaphrasing and we went from a "Marcus verbs something to Holconius" to "Marcus favors Holconius" (because favet takes a dative) no one had a problem.
It would NOT be worthwhile to use a reading card with every story, but you MUST slow the students down once a stage, I think, to make them really THINK about the ENDINGS. Otherwise, the stories are so well written that it is easy to anticipate what comes next. And is that bad? No, that's what good reading/writing is all about. Think about how FAST you read a good novel that's so well-written that you're just INTO THE STORY. And why shouldn't Latin be that way? It should. But we MUST slow our students down to insure that they also get what the morphology is all about.
