One Word at a Time - Pass and Tell

This is an activity which I just recently learned from Emma Vanderpool, a fellow Latin teacher, and it is based on Bob Patrick's One Word at a Time (OWAT) activity. Emma modified this as a pre-reading activity to introduce new vocabulary, which is the original intent of an OWAT. However, I made some changes and used it as a pre-writing activity to prepare students for a free write and therefore used known vocabulary. Here are directions for either use:

Pre-Reading (to introduce new, targeted vocabulary) - here are Emma's directions

1. Students should sit in columns.
2. Every student has a piece of paper. Inform students that they will cooperatively write a 6-sentence story. 

3. A new target word is projected on the board. The students must use that word in a sentence to begin the story.

4. Students then pass the piece of paper to the student behind them, and a new word is projected on the board.

5. The receiver should read the sentence(s) written, illustrate the latest sentence, and then write a new sentence to the story.

6. The paper should be passed 6 times

Pre-Writing (to prepare students for a writing. This uses known vocabulary) - these are my directions

1. Students should sit in columns in groups of 4.
2. Every student has a piece of paper. Inform students that they will cooperatively write a 8-sentence story. 
3. Two known words are projected on the board. The students must choose ONE of the words to create a sentence to begin the story. Here are my Google Slides which I projected. 
4. Students then pass the piece of paper to the student behind them, and a new choice of words is projected on the board. 
5. The receiver should read the sentences written, illustrate the latest sentence, and then write a new sentence to the story. 
6. The paper should be passed 8 times. 
7. Spend around 4 minutes for each slide. In the beginning, students probably will not need 4 minutes, but as more sentences are added, they will need that time to read over what has already been written and to have time to figure out what to add.

Observations 

1. It was fun for students to read their "stories" afterwards and to see where the stories went based on their original sentence.
2. Giving students a choice of known words for a pre-writing activity allowed for more variety in creating their sentences, BUT I will also try this out with giving new words one at a time like in a regular OWAT to see how it works in previewing vocabulary.
3. Although the stories became rather random, the stories still made sense to a degree!
4. Making students use a particular word(s) for their sentences gave them parameters but still gave them a degree of freedom in how to use that word(s).
5. This activity requires critical thinking, because students not only have to understand what they read but they have to create a new sentence on their own which will continue on with what has been previously written.

Horse and Puppy (Budweiser Super Bowl Commercial) - Movie Talk

This is a special movie talk for me, because it was the first one which was demonstrated to me where the purpose of a movie talk made full sense to me! At the 2016 IFLT in Chattanooga, I saw Katya Paukova demo a movie talk in Russian using this specific commercial, and because I was experiencing it like a student, suddenly, I understood its power! Katya said that the best movie talks are those which appeal to the emotions, and this one certainly will give you the feels. It is a Budweiser commercial from the 2015 Super Bowl involving a man, a puppy, and a Clydesdale horse (the Budweiser mascot). Although the commerical is only 58 seconds, it packs in a lot of emotion!

For Latin 3, I adapted this commercial, because I needed to preview such "odd" words as wander, (to) here and there, have fear, and far away. I had previously used this commercial in Latin 1 to preview words such as home, sad, happy, and afraid, so I was able to manipulate what I scripted before in Latin 1 to meet my Latin 3 needs.

NOTE - the actual commercial ends at 0:58 but is replayed for the remainder of the video

English script

Latin script

Observations

1. Even though this commercial is only 58 seconds, I was able to get a good 30 minutes as a movie talk in narrating, pointing/pausing, asking processing questions, and using PQAs.
2. You may need to explain how this commercial relates to Budweiser, since students asked me: Budweiser Super Bowl commercials traditionally spotlight their Clydesdale mascot and not the beer itself (thankfully). Warning - the man is holding a Budweiser bottle in his hand at the very end prior to the Budweiser logo so you may want to end the movie talk before that. 
3. There is another Budweiser Super Bowl commercial involving the puppy, horse, and man. The previous year in 2014, the commercial was about how the puppy, man, and horse first met, and how the puppy brought about a love connection for the man. I do not know what happened to the woman in the 2015 commercial - did the relationship not work out but yet the man kept the dog? Did the woman tragically pass away? Is the woman on vacation in the 2015 commercial? I like the 2015 commercial much better!

Thank you, Katya, for introducing me to how a movie talk should be done through this commerical!

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.