I've been doing an experiment for the last couple years, and so far, I'm finding that it's working - not only for me, but also for my students. I've been in the process of untextbooking. That is, I've been phasing the book out of my classroom. My Latin I students don't touch it really at all, and it comes in a little bit (just the first year book, and just because it has good stories in it) second year, but I only pull out the stories I think the kids are going to connect with and find funny.
2011 was my first year at my current high school. Our county uses the Cambridge Latin Course, which - at least for a while - has wonderful stories. I had taught out of it for the year I was at my previous school, and so I jumped right into it at GHS, too. But here's the problem - and it's the one I'd found the previous year: while we were interested in the stories we were telling together, and while several of the stories in the CLC are great, many of them feel like a slog, most of them were above the kids' heads (some of the humor is sly, and the kids' sense of the language isn't that developed yet), and it was more about pushing through the reading than it was about enjoying it. I'm not an expert on reading, although I love to do it, but it seemed to me like that just wasn't a good way to teach reading.
So I threw the textbook out the window and walked into the next year sort of unprepared. I don't know that I'd do it like that again, but I will say this: since doing that, my Latin I students have been better prepared, better readers, better listeners, better speakers.
I sat down and I thought about this: what things are the most important things we need to talk about? The answer, obviously, is ourselves. So we started with where we live, and who lives there. Our textbook never really addresses that. We get bedroom, kitchen, garden, but not porch. Not living room, nor television, nor bathroom, nor all the fabulous things in bathrooms. So we spent a lot of time on our houses, and we found out that Drew has no bathrooms in his house, but he lives next door to a stegosaurus who is willing to share his.
Then I reached the end of that unit and realized I had no guidepost to get me anywhere (AHH!) and nearly reverted to the book until I remembered that I didn't like teaching out of the book, so I sat down and mapped out all the stuff my kids would probably want to be able to talk about. They wanted to talk about things that were theirs, things that happened in the past and would happen in the future, about themselves and their friends, where things were, what they like/wanted to do/preferred/etc.
I made a list of grammar topics built around those things (genitives, imperfect, future, infinitives, comparatives and superlatives, plural stuff - nouns and verbs), because alas that is how I've been programmed, and then I built vocabulary and topical units around those things. We learned about wearing things, buying things, shopping, houses, our pets, among other things. and at the end of the year, there was definitely stuff on that list we didn't get to, but we had fun doing it. We created our own stories, and there was a lot of ownership in that. They were attached to their stories and characters because they were theirs, and so they were able to read so much more easily because they already knew the story. They enjoyed it, because it was a topic they already found entertaining, because they had created it.
I spent a lot of that first year foundering, trying to figure out what vocabulary to introduce, what direction to go, how long to stay on a topic, and there was an extent to which my kids suffered for that. This year, though, I was more prepared for it because I'd done it before, and it went more smoothly. It went a little more slowly, because I'd begun to understand where they needed time and where they didn't, but at the end of the year, I feel actually comfortable with my year, where my students are and what they know. I feel as though I taught them, like they progressed - it was visible to me, and more than that, it felt like healthy progress.
In the future, my goal is to build topical units, and then build vocabulary and grammar from there, but I'm a little way off from that. I think, though, the discovery of language within topics is so much more valuable and sticks better than the discovery of topics through grammar. I'm still getting there.
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