Lists - Brain Break

This is a brain break, which I learned from my colleague John Foulk, who in turn learned this from Miriam Patrick. The premise is very simple: students individually (and corporately) will create/add to a list based on a category. Call upon students one at a time in a prescribed order (such as seating), and when that student responds with a word to add to the category, write it on the board. Students cannot repeat a word already stated, and the brain break ends when someone cannot add a new word to the list. However, I have changed it so that students can help each other out when a student cannot think of anything new to add in order to keep to the brain break continuing.

Some category examples

• Fast-food chain restaurants - this topic needs a lot of defining if you choose this, as everyone has a different idea of what a fast-food restaurant is. I ended up defining it as "a restaurant where there is a drive-thru window, you have to order at an order box, and then pick up your order at a window." While restaurants may have a pickup window for mobile/online orders or offer curbside service, you must speak to a worker first at an order box! 
• Chemical symbols/names of elements on the periodic table - I have printed out an alphabetical list since I myself do not remember many of these!
• Cartoon characters
• Items found in a kitchen
• Cable TV channels
• State capitals 
• Current Olympic sports (both winter and summer) - Narrow this category just to the sports and not subcategories in the individual sports. For example, Athletics/Track and Field is a category but not the 100m dash since the event itself is part of that category. 

Observations

1. Allowing students to volunteer additional words for students who cannot think of an answer continues to add to the community building of the class. Students did not want the brain break to end!
2. When I did the fast-food category, I could tell which students had grown up in/visited other parts of the country, because they would name fast food chains local to that area/region, such as In 'n' Out, Whataburger, Hardees, Karl's Jr., Jack in the Box, etc. - lots of fun!
3. Because the Toyko Olympics just happened, this topic was current in students' minds.
4. This is one brain break which students constantly request, so I have to keep finding new categories!

Dictations Revisited

In students' return to an in-person, post-hybrid classroom, I have realized that they need A LOT of guided support. We cannot make the assumption that everything is going to be "business as usual" and that we can pick up from where we left off last year. As I have stated before in previous blog posts, I have entered this year with the mindset that students did NOT acquire any language last year (or at least the majority of students did not), so I need to focus on sheltering vocabulary (and not grammar) and giving them a lot of support in the beginning. While last year teaching hybrid in a primarily digital environment was definitely challenging, there were a number of revisions and adaptations which occurred to usual face-to-face lessons which I liked and am now incorporating back into my regular teaching. One of them is the dictatio activity.

The basics of the dictatio still remain the same in terms of the activity itself. 

1. I read aloud a sentence SLOWLY in the target language many times while students write down the words as I say them.
2. After the 3rd time of reading the sentence aloud, I project the sentence on the screen.
3. Students make any spelling corrections to their sentences if any words are misspelled.

Here is how I have changed the way in which I do dictations:

1. I write all unknown/new targeted words on the board prior to the dictation with their English defintion in order to establish meaning right away for students and will point/pause at those words when they come up in the dictation. This way when students are writing down unknown words, they are able to understand the meaning immediately instead of waiting for me to project the sentence and having to ask then.
2. I now give students a handout/digital document that has three boxes: sentence, corrections, picture/translation. This is something which my instructional team did with students when we were trying to conduct dictations virtually via Zoom (it did not work well at all!).
3. Students will transcribe the dictation in the Sentence box.
4. When I project the sentence, students will the correct spelling for any misspelled words in the Corrections box. If they had no spelling errors, they write Optime!
5. We now do a choral reading of the projected sentence to establish meaning.
6. I then give students one minute to either write down a translation of the sentence into English or to draw a visual representation of the sentence. At an IFLT many years ago, I saw Annabelle Williamson do this with elementary school students, and I was amazed at how focused they were in doing a dictation!

Observations

1. Establishing meaning of unknown words for students during the actual dictation has been very helpful for students, because now they can have an immediate understanding of these new words as they write them down.
2. The format of the handout gives structure to students as they perform this activity.
3. The choral reading afterwards continues to establish meaning for students with the dictated sentence.
4. The one-minute of writing down a translation of the sentence or drawing the sentence gives students something to do with that sentence (albeit for a minute).

Destiny Movie Talk

This is a great movie talk if you are introducing rooms of the house, numbers, or directional verbs of motion. I just recently introduced this movie talk in my Latin 3 classes, because I needed to target the words appropinquat (approach) and abit (go away), but this could easily be used in level 1 to introduce intrat (enter) and discedit/exit (leave).

Latin script

English script 

Observations

1. Because the main character is reliving an episode in his life, there are tons of repetitions in this animated short.
2. The first time I did this with a class, it went okay - students were kind of engaged but not overly excited. The second time I did it with another class, I made students pay attention to the number of clocks in each room by asking Latine how many clocks were in each room when I paused it (and then did a running total) and to what time it was on the clock when the man woke up each time - students really got into that and were A LOT more engaged in the movie talk, because the plot began to make much more sense.
3. There is an end-credit scene to watch at the end too!

Read, Draw, and Discuss

This is an activity which I had done often in the past to introduce a new reading but had forgotten about during the Covid hybrid interim. However, returning to a post-Covid classroom, my colleague Rachel Ash did this with our Latin 2 classes, and I saw that this was an excellent way to introduce students to a new reading with lots of scaffolded support while addressing various modalities. The activity is exactly what the name says: read, draw, and discuss.

After the 2nd full week of class with my Latin 3's, I did a vocabulary ranking survey where students let me know digitally what new targeted vocabulary they really knew, knew, kind of knew, and did not know at all using a Google Slide sorting activity. Using those results of the top 5 words which students felt that they kind of knew and did not know, I created a story which furthered the Pullo et Vorenus story but deliberately targeted those words with which students had informed me that they did not possess much familiarity. Essentially, the reading "circled the plane" a bit in terms of story but got in lots of repetitions in new ways in order to keep the reading novel.

PreClass

1. I created 6 Google Slides which had the new reading on them. On these slides, I underlined those words from the survey and glossed them at the bottom of each slide. 

During Class

1. Students had a whiteboard, marker, and rag.
2. I projected the first slide and read the Latin aloud to the class as they followed along. 
3. I asked if there were any words which they did not know in order to establish meaning. If students had questions, I would translate that particular word for them and re-read that Latin sentence but translate the word in English when I came to that word.
4. Following this, we did a choral reading of that particular slide in order to establish additional meaning. 
5. After this, I gave students three minutes to illustrate that paragraph/sentences on their whiteboards.
6. Once the three minutes were up, I told the class to show at least one other person their whiteboard picture and to tell in Latin what they had drawn or point to specific parts of the picture and to use the Latin from the projected reading. If they wanted, they could also write the Latin on their picture with arrows pointing at the specifics.
7. I then have students show me their pictures. I looked at their whiteboard pictures as a comprehension check and then picked three pictures to show the class. I have a document camera which allows me to project the pictures onto my screen.
8. Using their pictures, I asked circling questions, processing questions, and PQA's based on the pictures.
9. I then repeated the process again with the next slide.
10. This activity took 2 days.

Observations

1. This activity got in "a lot of bang for its buck," i.e., I felt that students really acquired much from doing this. Although it took two days to complete, I was able to get in lots of necessary repetitions with a variety of activities embedded into it which appealed to so many different modalities.
2. Projecting the pictures gave students novelty in seeing what others drew and that I might choose their drawings.
3. After this, I felt that students felt much more comfortable with those words which they had told me that they kind of knew and did not know. That does not mean that all students acquired all those words, but they still received lots of comprehensible input, exposure, and repetitions. 

Visiting "Sheltering Vocabulary, Not Grammar" Again

Now that I have returned to the classroom, one of my biggest challenges has been to see where knowledge gaps exist in students, i.e., what language did they actually acquire last year during hybrid teaching? And quite honestly, I have come to this conclusion: it is a futile attempt in many ways to do this. Several students have been very honest in telling me that they cheated on the majority of their work last year in all of their classes, because quite simply, they could. And my response to them has been, "And yep, we teachers knew that students would cheat when we assigned work. But based on the situation in which we were, there was not much which we could do about it."

So instead of trying to pinpoint specific knowledge gaps (which could take forever to find), I am really focusing on sheltering vocabulary, not grammar these first few months. Here is what I am doing:

1. I know that there are specific vocabulary and language structures which were covered last year, but I am going to assume that students never acquired them. For me, at least that levels the playing field for everyone, and I am not projecting wrong assumptions onto students.
2. In terms of vocabulary from last year, I am focusing on specific words which I know are important and then "chucking" the rest (see Carrie Toth's Vocabulary Chuck-It Bucket).
3. I am slowly beginning to introduce specific vocabulary words which I know students will need for this semester.
4. Using this limited set of vocabulary, I have created readings where I am using them in LOTS of language structures which we "covered" last year. As a result, there will be TONS of repetition of vocabulary in different grammatical forms, of which there will lot of repetition there too.

Example - Latin 3 reading:

Target words

milites, vocabatur, ostendere, fortior quam, celerior quam, nemo, cum, semper, odi, exercitus, iubebat ut, vehere, in castris, hostis, appropinquare, dux, ad defendam

Part 1

Olim erant duo milites. Primus miles Pullo vocabatur et semper fortitudinem ostendebat. Pullo erat fortior quam elephantus. Pullo semper exclamabat, “Nemo est fortior miles quam ego!”

Secundus miles Vorenus vocabatur et semper celeritatem ostendebat. Vorenus erat celerior quam equus. Vorenus semper exclamabat, “Nemo est celerior miles quam ego!”

Pullo et Vorenus erant non amici. Cum Vorenus vidisset Pullonem ostendentem fortitudinem, semper dixit, “Pullonem odi!” Cum Pullo vidisset Vorenum ostendentem celeritatem, semper dixit, “Vorenum odi!” 

Part 2

Pullo et Vorenus erant milites in exercitu Romano. Exercitus Romanus erat in Gallia, quod Gallia erat provincia Romana. Exercitus Romanus erat in Gallia ad defendam provinciam. 

Dux Modestus vocabatur. Quod Modestus erat dux, iubebat Pullonem et Vorenum ut aquam in castris vehant. Quod Pullo erat fortior quam elephantus, vehebat plus (more) aquae quam Vorenus. Cum Pullo vidisset Vorenum vehentem minus (less) aquae, exclamavit, “Cur tu es miles in exercitu Romano? Tu es non fortior quam puer! Non difficile est mihi vehere multam aquam in castris, quod nemo est fortior miles quam ego!” Cum Vorenus audivisset Pullonem exclamantem verba (words), dixit, “Pullonem odi, quod semper fortitudinem ostendit!”  

Subito, hostis appropinquabat! Cum Modestus vidisset hostem appropinquantem, iubebat Pullonem et Vorenum ut vehant arma ad milites in castris ad defendam Galliam. Quod Vorenus erat celerior quam equus, vehebat arma ad milites celerius quam Pullo. Cum Vorenus vidisset Pullonem lente (slowly) vehentem arma, exclamavit, “Cur tu es miles in exercitu Romano? Tu es non celerior quam testudo (turtle)!! Non difficile est mihi vehere arma ad milites, quod nemo est celerior miles quam ego!” Cum Pullo audivisset Vorenum exclamantem verba (words), dixit, “Vorenum odi, quod semper celeritatem ostendit!” 

Cum dux Modestus audivisset Pullonem et Vorenum exclamantes, dixit, “Pullonem et Vorenum odi, quod semper hi (these) duo milites sunt molesti (annoying). Nemo est molestior miles in castris quam Pullo et Vorenus!” 

Observations

1. Some may scoff and say that the reading is maybe too easy and overly repetitive for beginning Latin 3 students, but considering last year, I really have no idea what/if students acquired any language during hybrid teaching. It is completely wrong for me to assume that they did or to place the blame on them if they did not.
2. Students found the reading to be very engaging and want to know more!
3. In many ways, part 2 is an "embedded reading" of part 1 (although the plot is moving forward), since so many of the same sentences are repeated verbatim. That is intentional - this way I could get in more repetitions of language in a new context. Having those repetitions of exact sentences from part 1 actually helped students feel successful when reading part 2 (and repeat them again for those who may have struggled when reading part 1 the first time).
4. Because I had limited vocabulary, I was able to use circling, processing questions, and PQAs as a way to get in lots of oral/aural repetitions of the words in many different ways which did not seem repetitive.
5. Because I had limited vocabulary but not grammar in the readings, I was able to get in a lot of different language structures and throw in pop-up grammar timeouts. Because so many of my students were digital last year and since I do not know what language they acquired, I have made many of my students be the grammar experts for particular language structures. Every time I want to ask about a particular structure, I call on that student to tell me about it. 

Feeling Rusty

I have now been back face-to-face with students (in a completely masked classroom setting) for almost three weeks now, and I am SO glad to be teaching again where I am no longer bound to remaining behind my desk in front of a computer Zooming my lessons! After 18 months of digital/hybrid teaching, I feel like I have been chomping away at the bit like a racehorse ready to blast away at the starting gate, just waiting for the opportunity. I have SO missed teaching the way in which I was accustomed pre-Covid. I have missed being able to interact with students and to get them to interact with each other and with readings in the target language.

However, at the same time, I have noticed that I am SO rusty in many ways when it comes to teaching face-to-face again. I have been trying to get back into circling, asking processing questions, and doing PQA's, and often I find myself asking, "Now how I do this again? How did I ask questions before?" This past summer, I had served as a coach both for the online Acquisition Boot Camp summer class and for the IFLT Conference, where we addressed how to ask questions and I even demo'd how to do them many times this summer. But now face-to-face real time with students, I find myself hesitating at times, asking, "So what comes next again? What kind of question do I want to ask?"

But I also know this: it is perfectly okay to feel rusty doing this. Much like an athlete feels rusty in spring training after not having competed in a few months, so will I when it comes to teaching. If I as the teacher am feeling rusty asking processing/PQA questions in the target language, I am certain that students are definitely feeling rusty answering them! Heck, considering that I know that several of them NEVER showed up for a synchronous Zoom session last year, for many of them, they have not even heard Latin for 18 months!

I am finding myself re-reading so many past posts from my own blog both for instruction and for inspiration. This is the post which I have been re-reading to get myself back into circling, asking processing questions, and doing PQA's.

•  Circling - the Art of Questioning

Most likely, I will write up a script of questions to use as a reference until I start feeling like I have regained my foundation. 

Where are you feeling rusty?

Back to School - 2nd week Observations

On May 4, I wrote the following blog post: I am So Ready. Now 4 1/2 months later, I am back to teaching face-to-face (in a masked classroom), and I am LOVING it. Everything which I had listed in that blog post (outside of teaching wearing a mask) I am finally able to do again! After two weeks, I am so feeling like myself again as a teacher after the weirdness of last year known as hybrid teaching. This week, one of my students whom I had last year in-person but still hybrid-taught said to me, "You are SO different as a face-to-face teacher. You're a lot more fun, and you talk to us much more." I had to laugh, because what else could I do but congratulate him on his remarkable perception?

However, as COVID cases continue to rise and the uncertainty of how this new wave of the pandemic is going to play out, I am learning to cherish the moments which I do currently have with my students in a face-to-face setting. I am savoring the types of learning activities and language interactions which I am able to have with students which I was not able to facilitate at all last year. As the possibility of going digital again for a time looms overhead, I am definitely not taking this time for granted. I am truly enjoying my students and my time as a face-to-face teacher. Maybe I am still in the honeymoon phase of it all and perhaps the novelty has not worn off yet, but I am still going to treasure this window of opportunity for as long as I can.