I've never done a readalong before! I've also never Officially Taught a novella before. (quam horrificum!) I've read them with my class for fun, I've read them as kindergarten day activities, I've even done extended storytelling across a semester (looking at you, Jason and the Argonauts...), but I've never picked an already written novella to teach. So here's to adventure, and leave a comment/send a message if you've got pluses or deltas you want me to know about! My goal is to post once a week with the stuff we did that week, and if there's anything particularly fantastic that I think needs a separate post, I'll put that up, too. If you want to follow along, make sure to subscribe to the Comprehensibilibuddy on the home page, and I'll make announcements in the facebook groups, too.
I'm teaching Lucia Heros in Latin two this year. If you haven't read it, it's about a six year old girl who wants to be a hero, but whose family keeps telling her puellas Romanas non decet. Lucia doesn't live up to Roman expectations for a "good girl," but as Laurel Thatcher Ulrich tells us, well-behaved women don't make history. Lucia experiments with living in some other heroes' stories, but with the help of her neighbors Agrippina and Rufus, as well as her own frog-and-mud-loving soul, Lucia learns that girls can be heroes, and so can she.
I have a habit (bug? feature?) of starting out new units on a REALLY wide view. Teaching horror? Let's talk about what scary means to us and meant to the Romans. Teaching travel? Let's talk about mores and consuetudines across the world and examine what symbolism we see in the American flag and the bald eagle (spoiler: a lot of stuff I wouldn't have come up with on my own...). So we've been talking about monsters lately, their body parts, what they do with those body parts, what their powers are, etc. This coming week, we're going to broad view out to "what's a monster? what's a hero?"
I'm currently seeing all my sophomore-senior classes digitally every day (which includes Latin II). This coming week, I'll have some of those kids in person.
What we did this last week:
Monday
Today we talked about the chimera, Medusa, and a centaur. Over the last several days, we've been talking about animals, their body parts, and their noises. (for example, we learned that the camelopardi sonus is NON EST NON EST NON EST, which I didn't previously know.)
I have some plastic critters I got from Michaels YEARS ago which are wildly inaccurate representations of the chimera, Medusa, and a centaur. So we looked at pictures of each of those as well as my plastic models, determined whose head was a snake and whose head was snakeses (the chimera and Medusa respectively), whose sound was AHHHHHH (the chimera), who was peritus currendi (the centaur), whose body the chimera has (a lion, they felt), etc.
The kids were on an A/B schedule at this time, so I also gave the ones on the off day a shorted version as an edpuzzle that you can watch (without the questions etc) here. They interacted with that and on the whole did a very nice job. Forgive me, this is the fourth time I recorded this video, so I was fairly tired, and the third was much better, but screencastomatic ate it, so please forgive my English editorializing about Bellerophon... :D
(he does suck.)
Tuesday
Still A/B. The kids read a short story I wrote about Catmonstrum (absolutely a monster I found on the internet...), its body parts, its home, its Great Enemy, and its problem. They answered some questions, and they wrote the end of the story as a timed write.
I like giving "comprehension" questions. I.e. I do include some things like "ubi Catmonstrum" habitat and they need to have understoodCatmonstri domus in silva est, but I also like questions like "quomodo similis Catmonstro es?" This doesn't demosntrate comprehension of SPECIFIC story elements, but it does (a) require deeper thinking and (b) ask them to have understood the story.
Wednesday
We've moved to a six period day at this point, so I'm now seeing all kids every day. I put them in breakout rooms with a flippity game (if you do not know flippity, please know flippity. andrew morehouse told me about this, and i'm forever indebted to him. i'm also secretly not telling most of my school about it so the kids don't get burned out on it... caveat usor, though: if your school uses gsuite and you're signed into that school gsuite when you use flippity, the kids will also have to be signed in to gsuite in order to use the game you create, because flippity functions on google sheets).
I gave them what amounts to pieces of colored paper they could move around to make sentences. We did a few together while I screen shared, and then I put them in breakout rooms to work together. Some kids said they would have preferred to do this on their own, so I adapted throughout the day. Groups worked best for me because some kids couldn't get flippity to work, so in groups it meant one kid could screen share, and it was fine.
Requirements: construct six sentences. one of them has to include a body. (we drew later, and it turns out it's hard to draw monsters that don't have bodies.)
They had 6-10 minutes, depending on the class. Then we came back to large group, they took out whiteboards (I have required the kids to own white boards, though if they don't and are using papers, I'm not saying anything about it), and one kid from each group read their monster description, and we all drew them. They were very beautiful.
Thursday
We built/designed/drew our own monster from scratch. I've positioned a giant white board in front of my webcam (though if you're on zoom, you could easily use the whiteboard there, or if you're not, Andrew Morehouse suggests aggie.io). I asked the kids what body parts the monster had, whose parts they were, we no-pressure-refreshed in dextra parte, in summa parte, in ima parte, in sinistra parte, and propius. There were no partes e longinquo sitae. :) I drew and labeled all these parts on the white board, periodically circling them, having kids show me fingers for comprehension, type answers in the chat box, etc.
Then we discussed quo nomine monstrum vocatur, ubi domus monstri est, cur haec domus monstri est?, quis inimicus monstri est, quid monstrum vexat, quid monstrum delectat, and what does this monster do with X body part. (turns out we have a thing with a dragon head, and it raps. go figure.) None of these questions are new to the kids. They do not know the word inimicus, though, so I'm taking the opportunity to teach it. This will come in handy - it doesn't appear in Lucia, but it will facilitate discussing monsters and their enemies, who the hero is, who the enemy is, and whether Lucia sees something as an enemy. Plus it's a pretty high frequency word.
I've asked them whether the monster is ingenii pravi or boni, what other things are tam ingenii pravi/boni quam [monstrum]. Squidward is. The Grinch isn't.
I'm using this opportunity to make sure they remember the following words that will come up in Lucia: vexat itaque delectat
semper
numquam
One of my favorite techniques, and one I used a lot today, is "oh look at all the stuff i wrote. i'm just going to renarrate this whole thing and stop sometimes, and you as a class should all chorally fill in the next word."
Friday
First we listed new words and phrases from the last week, as well as phrases that aren't new that we remember using to describe our monster.. We've learned modo, tam...quam and modus [ndi]. We remember monstrum delectat and monstro cordi est and monstro odio est. We remember monstrum peritum -ndi est. We remember potius quam. We talk about its modus edendi. That last one (modus -ndi) won't come up in Lucia, but it'll help us discuss what her method of being a hero is and whether it works.
Some timed writes. We watched the Smithsonian giant panda cam and the San Diego Zoo rhinoceros cam and observed what the "monster" was doing. They had three minutes to write in a google doc they titled Timed Writes [name] because they're digital right now and I can't access their journals. They wrote everything they could think of about the 'monster.' Then I asked them to put in the chat box one sentence they'd written about the monster. I learned a lot about the preferences of pandas and learned that the lefthand rhino is as pretty as the righthand rhino, so that's good.
We drew the panda on the board. We identified its body parts. We spent a lot of time last year on quo (with what), because it's my favorite question and I think it's super useful, so we brought it back here. I asked them what the monster does with its head, what it does with its colors, what it does with its feet. I got some silly answers (contra umbras pugnat?) and some real ones (coloribus se celat), and then we TPRed a little. It's funny to watch kids hide in their jackets. Especially if you also hide in your jacket at the same time.
I gave them seven minutes at the end of class to do a second timed write: recall our monster from yesterday, look at your picture of it, etc, and write everything you can remember. Pick two of its body parts and express what it does with those body parts.
And then we headed off into the weekend!
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