ginlindzey

My son likes to play Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and honestly I like this game the most of all the ones he plays. The backgrounds are beautifully drawn, storyline isn't bad, the quests are varied, creatures fun, and the music is pleasant enough. Oh, and there's no cussing. My son, who is autistic, constantly demands for me to watch, even though usually I'm usually working on something or grading something while he's playing. At least I'm hanging in the room and we are discussing what's going on in the storyline.

So earlier today I was reading through the early years of this blog, tagging entries as I look for things I've written in the past regarding reading methodologies, and decided that I needed a break. I had read several posts that talked about playing cards so I guess it was on the mind. Thus I grabbed my son's RWBY deck, shuffled (miscere, pontem facere, miscere, pontem facere), then counted out cards in Latin as I set up a round of solitaire the old fashioned way. So I'm working on *thinking* in Latin, and look up occasionally to watch what Link is doing on the screen, and reply to my son's comments and questions... but I'm doing it in Latin. He knows a few Latin phrases and in fact likes to bark "tace, ancilla!" at me.  So I'm having fun, counting monstra which are being killed, gemmae collected, etc.  He's alternating between "tace, ancilla" and "mom, stop" but I'm having fun and he's not really irritated with me.

Then he gets to this screen where Link's in wolf mode (lupus) and is picked up by an avis monstruosa and flies over river where all of these balloon fruit are flying which need to be popped to score points. And I thought to myself, hey, I'm supposed to be finding activities that would be high interest for students--why not find a way to use games? In particular, I was thinking earlier today that I need to find engaging homework activities since we are moving to block scheduling next year. (That is, I want them to have a reason to engage in the language every day.)  I had been brainstorming about how to motivate students to use Latin outside of class. We use Google Classroom to tremendous effect this past year and I had been thinking I would just make it work even better this coming year by posting things of high interest with maybe some sort of google doc/survey/quiz thingy that could be entered online.



So consider the above videoclip from the game which I found on YouTube (because, ya know, everything's on YouTube). I was thinking about teaching numbers which I like to do early in the year. It's always something easy to circle in with other things. Numbers take practice and you need things to count.  Why not count these fraga (strawberries), melones cantalupenses, & melones aquosi? Link also goes through several waterfalls (cataractae)--count them too.  Challenge students to find other game clips to post back to the Google Classroom page to challenge others to count items.  Later on, when more vocab /structures are acquired, this videoclip could be viewed again to discuss colors or to do a movie talk or something.

Games!  Why not/quidni? And let's be honest--where else outside of the writings of Romans would you find as much killing as there is in video games? Finally, a place to put all of the killing and weapon vocabulary to use. I was having so much fun saying things to my son like, " tu monstrum necavisti et, ecce, SAGITTAE!" because, ya know, he killed this monster and then a bundle of arrows appeared. Link had to quest to acquire the gladius domini (master sword, for those who don't play the game). Midna appears first as Link's umbra before taking shape. And, heck, did I mention Link turns into a wolf? How Roman is that?!

Anyway, just some random thoughts.