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Monday, January 23, 2017

Monster in the Closet - Movie Talk

Today, Bob Patrick and I are beginning Chapter 4 of Brando Brown Canem Vult. As always in lesson planning, I typed up the story in order to enter the chapter in an online frequency word counter so that I could see if there were any high frequency words which I need to pre-teach prior to the reading. If you know Chapter 4, it is the one where Brandon brings home the puppy for the first time and must hide it from his mother. In Chapter 4, there are A LOT of bedroom words, e.g., obdormit, evigilat, armarium, lectus, and a number of phrases, e.g., magnos sonos facit, multos sonos facit, ianuam aperit.

Once again, the Movie Talk database came to the rescue. When I did a search for the word "bed," I came across this short movie, and it fit perfectly for the words which I was wanting to pre-teach - it was as if this short movie had been created solely to preview many of the words for Chapter 4 of Brando Brown! 

The movie short is a Spanish film called El Monstruo en el Armario, or in Latin, "Monstrum in Armario." Even though there is some dialogue in Spanish, this version does have subtitles - I still ended up narrating the dialogue in Latin.


Below are two scripts which you can use - one in Latin, one in English.

Latin script

English script

Observations
  1. I found that this movie talk was a very easy one to ask questions which required responses more than just the basic circling questions/answers. I was able to ask many "what do you think" kinds of questions.
  2. In the Latin script, some may be surprised to see that I asked/rephrased sentences and questions as indirect statements. A traditionalist would state that indirect statements are "too difficult" for Latin 1 students and should be reserved for Latin 2 or even Latin 3. However, I have found that as long as you establish meaning for words like "do you think" by writing them on the board and use the indirect statement, probably most students will understand what you are saying. Again, our goal is comprehension. There is NOTHING but tradition which says that indirect statements cannot be used in Latin 1.
  3. In using an indirect statement, some students may ask why the verb form has changed. I will do a quick pop-up grammar, explaining that the structure needed a different form, but I will not go into a lengthy explanation about indirect statements. Usually, I will respond first, "Did you understand what i said?" and then go from there.
  4. Normally I will turn the sound down in a Movie Talk, but this one required sound when going through it due to the "sounds" which the man hears.
  5. Even though this is a 3-minute Movie Talk, I found that I was able to go for 35 minutes or so with this. 

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