Culture Lesson Plan - Roman Pets

As part of our Brandon Brown Canem Vult -1st Chapter Lesson Plan, Bob Patrick and I introduced animalia domestica Romana (Roman pets) as our culture topic. Since our goal was to introduce culture in the target language through a comprehensible reading (see here for a previous post on this topic), this is the lesson plan which we used. Bob wrote the original reading which we then embedded in different ways:

Day 1

1. Warm up - project ppt slide of various animals and ask questions in Latin about "which animal .....?" (powerpoint, script)
2. Dictatio - short version of the original passage (dictatio script, dictatio ppt to project)

Day 2

1. Complete dictatio as needed
2. Review dictatio passage through choral reading
3. Play multiple rounds of Socrative review (Space Race) of dictatio passage - directions:
   a) importing quiz into your own list of Socrative quizzes - the SOC code # is SOC-25027325
   b) starting Space Race
   c) student paced quiz directions

Day 3

1. Read/Draw/Discuss of the dictatio passage

Day 4

1. Complete Read/Draw/Discuss as needed
2. Timed write using Read/Draw

Day 5

1. Read full Animalia Domestica reading
2. Draw 1-2-3 of one paragraph from the full reading

Observations

1. I really liked this passage which Bob wrote, because it gave students an understanding of why particular pets were more favorable to the Romans than others.I actually learned a lot from the passage.
2. When doing the dictatio, due to the constant repetitions of phrases, I actually had students predicting aloud what the next words/phrases were going to be as I was reading it aloud. Yep, CI works!
3. By the time students got to the full reading, most found it to be quite easy to read due to having the foundation of the earlier embedded reading.