As I have stated many times here, this year I have been focusing on sheltering vocabulary with my Latin 1 classes. If you are not familiar with the concept (one can always use a refresher), Kristy Placido recently made a short video about the idea - in it, she addresses the four types of vocabulary words.
I really like how Kristy puts it, because I feel that many of us have a wrong idea about what "sheltering vocabulary" is. I feel that so many teachers think sheltering vocabulary at the lower levels is keeping vocabulary limited to a set limit for a unit/reading, but then move onto a new unit/reading where that previous high frequency vocabulary is not recycled and instead shelter a whole new limited set of vocabulary, which again is hardly reused in the following unit/reading. This is incredibly confusing for students, because they do not know what words they really should know, and it is frustrating for us teachers, because we feel like "students should still know these words, because we introduced them, but they do not." I have been SO guilty of this!
So last semester, I truly began to shelter vocabulary, trying to focusing on high frequency vocabulary and constantly recycling/providing lots of exposure. Here is the cumulative list of words/phrases which I targeted last semester.
- I had NO idea where I was going with this. I was embarking on this blindly. My goal was to introduce 5 new words a week, while constantly recycling previous targeted vocabulary.
- I based my curriculum solely on clip chats. This allowed me to find animated shorts in which I could target these words.
- In the beginning weeks of the semester, my focus was on verbs. In order for sentences solely to focus on the Latin verb, the sentences usually had a name and the brand name of an object, such as Elmo wants Takis, Dora has a Playstation, Carlita is bringing a BigMac. This way students could focus solely on the Latin word which was the verb.
- On the one hand, I wanted to focus on Super 7/Sweet 16 words, but at the same time, I did see some necessity to cover words which are on the Dickinson Latin high frequency list. Let me say, I do not fully agree with many of the words on this list, since it comes from those words found in classical literature, which is Advanced High/Superior level readings - maybe 15% of my students will go onto AP Latin, so why am I subjugating the other 85% who are not?! Often I will look at the words listed and say, "That is a Cicero word" or "That is a Vergil word" but were they actually high frequency among the everyday Romans?
- I only introduced ONE Latin verb for movement - ad...petit (heads for) - anytime a character in a story went somewhere, I used that phrase. This was absolutely deliberate, since petit is a high frequency Latin word. While many Latin textbooks will introduce ambulat (is walking) and currit (is running) quite early, those are not high frequency words and instead are rather "decorative" to me - they explain in what manner one is going. I can introduce those later on for descriptive purposes. I'd rather have students burn memory bandwidth on acquiring other words for first semester.
- I sheltered vocabulary like crazy and recycled these words OVER AND OVER. In other words, I was absolutely deliberate that these words appeared as much as possible in clip chats and readings throughout the semester so that they eventually became sight words for them when reading due to the rampant exposure.
- While my goal was to introduce 5 new words a week (so that there would be around 90 words at the end of the semester), I found that there were weeks where I needed to "circle the plane" some to revisit words and give students a chance to "plateau" in their learning. As a result, I did not reach my goal of 90 words by semester's end.
- In addition, there were weeks where I wanted to focus on introducing a new grammatical structure such as 1st person singular. Here is where I was truly able to shelter vocabulary, not grammar.
- Because my Latin 1 students are emergent Latin readers, sheltering vocabulary and recycling these words in their readings greatly aided their reading development. In addition, I patterned my stories after emergent novellas which contain predictable sentence structures/patterns and focus on 1-2 ideas presented in a sentence.
- Where I saw the benefits of sheltering vocabulary was in student writing! Refer to my blog post on Novice Writing Proficiency Assessments with Pictures
- I found that I could introduce a lot of new adjectives once students were familiar with "sum (I am)," because it seemed to flow naturally and I could incorporate it into dialogues.
- In the beginning, 5 words a week worked well, but I can see making it 6-8 words as the semester progresses, but this requires paying closer attention to actively recycling those words.
As I said, I was doing this blindly. This was a work in progress and still is. However, I have a MUCH better idea of how sheltering vocabulary works and am looking forward to improving how I implement this.