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).

Today, I put them in groups of 3-4 people, asked them to elect a praeses who didn't mind taking a risk, and then kicked the praesides out of the room with a book to read. They sat in the hall and read while I retold the story in a few sentences, targeting words and structures I wanted them to practice. I told it to them three times, circling and asking questions, and allowing them to clarify. I included some random details the praesides wouldn't have known. They repeated it to me. I told them, before I did this, what we were going to do with the story, which follows.

Then we brought the praesides back into the room, and I gave the groups five minutes to tell their individual praeses as much of the story as they possibly could, as many times as they could, Latine, however they needed to, to make sure their praeses knew the story. Then the praesides came to the front of the room, and they took a quiz on behalf of their groups. I asked them several very general comprehension questions about the story (I asked them to name one head of the chimaera, why Sthenoboea was mad, etc. These were not aimed at tripping the kids up at all and were designed to make sure the kids succeeded). They wrote their answers on whiteboards, and then we shared and discussed answers after each question, and we applauded for all the praesides. Each group got the grade their praeses got, so they were invested in making sure their praeses knew as much of the story as they could manage. If they didn't like their scores, individual kids were given the opportunity to, some time in the next week, come and answer a new question and improve their own score.