Reading Activities & Games

There was a query on Latinteach the other day from a new/student teacher about reading/translating and some games and such that could be done. While my students will tell you that I'm a lot of fun, I won't do a game unless there's real merit in it and it doesn't take up time that could be spent better.

And I think you CAN do reading activities that seem fun but are not fluff. Anyway, I'm sure I've posted about all of these things here before, if not repeatedly, but I was feeling more my old self when I wrote this post so I thought I'd include it here:

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There are a variety of ways to approach readings, especially if you are using a book like CLC with a lot of stories and good plots.

Using a reading card occasionally or metaphrasing helps students to see/focus on the morphology.

For instance, take Marcus Sullae murum ostendit (state 11). If you read it one word at a time, covering up the rest of the sentence and only revealing one word at a time, you can metaphrase it:

MARCUS verbed something to someone.
Marcus verbed something TO SULLA.
Marcus verbed THE WALL to Sulla. (Then have them guess the verb!)
Marcus SHOWED the wall to Sulla.

Of course, to do this all the time is slow and tedious.

But what about when in stage 13 you meet in the model sentences: villam et servos curat?

Students start making the house do things, etc. Then I get them to stop and think and metaphrase:

Someone verbed THE HOUSE.
Someone verbed the house AND something.
Someone verbed the house AND the slaves. (What do you think Varica the overseer did?)
He takes care of the house and the slaves.

You can, of course, do this with very long sentences, helping students to see phrasing and even the logic of the Roman sentence.

ANOTHER FUN thing to do with readings, and I've done this with the beast hunt/venatio in stage 8, is to have students act out the reading. I handed out pictures from the internet (laminated) of wolves, fierce dogs, deer, lions, etc. Then I read the story and they needed to follow along and act things out. If they were not acting appropriately, I would ask them in Latin (currisne per portam? NOLI AMBULARE! etc)

ALSO GOOD is questioning in Latin. Focus on only one or two words at a time at first, or two words in contrast. If you have a story with a lot of prepositional phrases, you can use QUO, UBI, and UNDE to emphasize the different types of prepositional phrases. Once we got datives, I was varying between quis and cui. (They are still shaky on that, and we'll do it again next week.)

BTW, I almost always do questioning in a choral response to lower the stress level and raise participation for the group as a whole. After I ask a given question, and if only a few respond, I will ask the same question again so EVERYONE can respond.

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What I do find--and it's difficult to address in a split level class--is that Latin 2 seems to get bogged down and "less" fun. Why that is, I'm not sure. Part is most definitely that the students who have been slacking all this time are beginning to suffer for it, but part of it--at least I think--is just being in a split level class and not being able to truly build upon things ever day. When we do have a day together, I feel like we are busy trying to answer all the questions and review what they weren't "getting" that I can't do the things I'd like to. For instance, if I had Latin 2 every day, I could read a story with them one day & translate, I could spend the next day with the new story or the old story just doing oral questioning. I feel like so many things have dropped this year; so many I had to compromise on.

I spent yesterday at our Area F JCL convention. Friday night I read certamen questions and just had so much fun. Yesterday I judged dramtic interp and the play competition. ALL I could think about was how much I ENJOYED it. My schedule--the split levels, the English classes, the zero hour class--has kept me from even feeling human this year.

And then these last couple of days, we've talked about things on Latinteach that I actually contributed to. I haven't contributed much these last couple of years and these recent topics reminded me that I do know what I'm doing OR at least know where I'd like to be. I'm not just showing videos in Latin and requiring vocabulary. We're actually READING Latin. I took four students to competition. Of the Latin 1 students, the two that took the reading comprehension test and sight recitation BOTH placed in BOTH events. In the grand scheme of things, *that's* what we are teaching. What a shame that so many students (and teachers?) shy away from these two events--the two events that require no studying, really, if you are taught Latin well in school. Maybe I am doing something right this year after all....

Extensive Reading...

This was another posting to Latinteach this week:

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For extensive reading, there's nothing like handing a level 2 student Oerberg's Lingua Latina. It starts so easy that you can get students to work on TRULY reading in WORD ORDER. In an ideal world, (maybe when I do pre-AP?) I would love to assign a chapter from that a weekend, and require Latin summaries for homework.

We have this idea that the only way to access Latin/to demonstrate that we understand Latin is by presenting a good translation. That just isn't the case.

I am constantly amazed by how much I can appreciate what I call a "fully loaded" Latin sentence--abl absolutes, phrases, clauses--and totally understand the meaning and WHY the words are in the order they are, phrased the way they are, etc.--AND YET, if I were to try to translate the same sentence into English it would be clumsy or if nothing else wordy.

Very few professors it seems (no offense!) offer any other way to access the language except through providing translations, often focusing on the importance of an eloquent translation. Jeanne at Davidson College actually asks students to explain the Latin in the Latin! And she always assigns more than a person could actually sit down and translate, but not more than a person could READ.

I am also puzzled how we go from the Cambridge Latin Course, with its ever lengthening stories to AP where was suddenly go back to just a dozen lines at a go. And with that said, I do know it is critical once you are in AP to make sure students have truly mastered their morphology and perhaps there is that feeling that one must demand exact precision, which can mean slowing down. But there must be a happy medium.

And I think it is extensive reading. I think it is the importance of demonstrating to students at some point before AP that they can read in word order, that it is pleasurable to READ Latin, even if it is easier Latin, that it is POSSIBLE to read Latin without knowing every single darn word on the page and to get meaning and pleasure from it, etc.

And then, when we return to reading the more serious or difficult material at the current level of learning, we must also remember NOT to just focus on a portion at a time.

Last year, when I had a student reading Ovid in independent study, every time we had a chance to go over the reading together, I would read the Latin outloud from the beginning of the story until the place we were working on. It is AMAZING how that simple act of rereading and reviewing will suddenly make vocabulary items jump out at you--words that are thematically related or simply repeated.

AP students would be greatly served by being trained--well in advance of AP--the importance of reading and rereading the text as a text, and not a set of lines to be decoded and then memorized if possible. Students shouldn't be studying for tests by reviewing all the translations they've written, but by rereading the Latin--seeing the words, seeing the phrasing, etc.
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Now, with all that said, am I doing extensive reading with my students?? No. Have I ever done? Yes. I tried an experiement one year with my 8th graders back at Porter. It went ok. I had reading logs for them, which they had to fill out and record whether they had done any prereading, etc, and then wrote a summary. Of course, it benefitted the A students but many others didn't do it.

So, I guess the question is, HOW do you get students to do this, HOW do you have accountability WITHOUT creating more work for you???

I'm thinking that if I have a pre-AP level 3 Latin class year after next that extensive reading will be one of the requirements--for over the weekend. I'll get a set of Lingua Latina, start easy, etc, and have summaries written in Latin due on Mondays. Then students can trade summaries and read them.

It may well be possible with the Latin 1's I have now, since I do have them writing stories in Latin every now and then. In fact, I have stories to post, I just haven't had a chance to post them yet.

Who knows? Maybe I will one day have all my great ideas put into action. One can dream....

Roman Alphabet

This was ANOTHER Latinteach post (2 posts, actually) from the beginning of the week.

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Oerberg's Lingua Latina has the alphabet, and I turned it into a bookmarker. The bookmarker can be found midway down this page: http://www.txclassics.org/drippinglatinclasses.htm.

One year I had students make a cootie catcher/fortune teller, had them write out the names of colors on the outside, have Roman numerals on the inside, and then a motto underneath. To "move" the first turn, when a person picked a number, the student had to spell it IN LATIN/with LATIN PRONUNCIATION.

When I'm bored, I've been known to spell words on billboards outloud in Latin. Yes, people look at me funny but people look at me funny all the time.
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[And then I added this:]
p.s. Er, I also have taught the alphabet with the Barney "I Love You" song....

(cap letters for long vowels)

A, bE, cE
dE, E, ef
gE, hA, I, cA
el, em, en
O-pE-cU (fast together)
er, es, tE
U ix ypsIlon
zEta now our song is done!
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If you aren't used to the Roman alphabet, play with it. Spell words outloud, etc.

:)