It is time for my holiday sabbatical from blogging, so as is tradition, I wish to share with you my annual "Top 5 Most Read Blog Posts" from this past year. I certainly do appreciate all of you who read my blog and have been able to glean something from it. I hope that you are able to rest and recuperate during your holidays and will return refreshed in 2024!
Just recently I did the following movie talk. This may be a very specific movie talk due to target vocabulary words, but at the same time, if you ever need one with these words, here it is!
For Latin 2, we are doing a series of readings about chariot races involving two characters Gaius and Scorpius (my colleague Liz Davidson wrote them a few years ago, and I have adapted them to new target words and structures). This particular chapter which we will be reading deals with two other characters betting during the chariot race, so I needed to preview gambling words (which are not very high frequency at all in Latin!). Here were the words which I wanted to target: sponsionem facit (is making a bet), alii...alii (some...other), nummos (coins), and plus (more).
I was surprised at how engaged students were when watching this. Not that the plot is not engaging, but I figured that they would figure out the twist very quickly - surprisingly, they did not!
I would suggest doing the actual movie talk without the sound first. There is a song which is playing to help convey the plot, and it can be distracting to keep stopping the animated short mid-verse many times.