Putting it Together

So after a year of blogging about teaching Latin using Comprehensible Input, how do I put it all together to teach a "unit"? To clarify, I do not teach "units" per se, but rather each week, I use a different story which focuses on my targeted vocabulary/structures.

The following is an example of a week's lesson plan which I did this semester, but by no means do I this same lesson plan every week, as I vary it up weekly with different activities in order to preserve the novelty. And by no means is this a definitive list. At the same time, however, I am very deliberate about how I scaffold the week's lesson. In the beginning of the week, it may seem like I am doing a lot of translating into English, but that is purely to establish meaning. By the end of the week, students are retelling the story completely in Latin, both orally and on paper; in order for this to happen, there has to be TONS of meaningful input and of interaction with the language first.

I try to do 3-4 different activites a day with the story. As Carol Gaab always says, "The brain CRAVES novelty." Rachel Ash puts it best: we want to get in repetitions without repetitive activities.

Preparing for the Week

1. Writing Version #1 and #2 of the story 

Day 1

1. I as the teacher act out/tell the story aloud in Latin, with plenty of pointing and pausing at the target vocabulary/structures which are written on the board. No circling, no PQAs so that I can establish listening flow.
2. Projecting the written story on the board, with me reading it aloud again and now doing circling and PQA's.

Day 2

1. Choral translation of the story
2. Stultus
3. Possible/Probable

Day 3

1. Social Emotional Learning partner translation
2. Cloze Sentence Activity
3. Parallel Universe

Day 4

1. Picture Story Retell (2 rounds)
2. 5-minute timed write of the story using the pictures

Day 5

1. On the board, I project a couple student-written endings to the story based on their timed writes from the day before. As a class, we read through them
2. Read Dating of embedded reading Version #2 of the story

Day 6

1. Consolidation activity, such as Word Chunk Game, Micrologue, Guess the Word, 

Like I said, this is just an example of one particular week, but I found that it was pretty successful. Hope this helps some of you!