You and I

One of the things my kids struggle with is you and I, particularly in the perfect tense. This year I've decided to spend a lot of time on conversational exchange, particularly about events in the past, particularly in the first and second person. Here are some things I've done:

1. I had a really interesting day a few weeks ago, so I drew six pictures on the board and told them a story, picture by picture. Under each picture I wrote I verbed and then you verbed. I asked them circling questions 'what did I do?' 'did I do this?' 'demonstrate this.' 'did you do this?' for the first picture, and then for each sequential picture, I started back at the beginning, asking quid egi? They'd answer, "sexta hora mane experrecta es. cerialibus ientavisti. postea, discipulos docuisti," etc. By the end of the story, each of them could tell the entire story.

For example, the first picture was sexta hora mane experrecta sum. All I wrote was experrecta sum and experrecta es, but I also drew a picture of sexta hora mane, so they were able to do that as well, because each time, I pointed at that and we repeated it.

Between each picture, we also added conjunctions and linking phrases, like tum, postea, quam ob rem and others.

2. The next day, I asked them about things they'd done, and we made a list on the board of things various kids had done, and circled through those.

3. I had them pair up, and they drew four pictures on mini whiteboards. Student A told one picture to their partner, and the partner repeated it in the second person. "today i went running." "today you went running." Partner A then started back over and got through the second picture, and so forth, until Partner B could tell Partner A Partner A's entire day.

Then they switched roles.

4. I had partner A take partner B's board and partner B take partner A's board and pretend to be each other.

5. I've had kids do a four picture presentation in front of the entire class. They say a sentence and draw it at the same time. When they finish their story, they choose four people from the class. Those four people each tell one picture in the second person back to the presenter.

Castor told his whole story to the class:

I went to school

I ate lunch with Sarah

I played soccer

I had a peanut butter jelly sandwich

Each of the four people then said one sentence

A: You went to school

B: You ate lunch with Sarah

etc.

We also acquired, in the course of this, soccer and peanut butter and jelly sandwich, because they were necessary to that kid's life. It's adding a lot of great icing words, and also revealing to me which words are highly necessary to my kids. AND I'm learning a lot about my kids!

We're not sheltering 'weird words,' so they can do this equally well with passive verbs, deponents and 'normal' verbs, and they're really getting very used to this concept and are using it on their own, mostly correctly.