Recently on Twitter, I was having a discussion with some other Latin teachers about the paucity of CI-based Latin stories which we could use. Although there are Anne Matava story scripts, there are very few CI-based stories which have been written in Latin by Latin teachers.
If you use a reading-based method textbook like Ecce Romani or Cambridge Latin Course, yes, you do have stories, but as those readings are not CI-based, the stories are vocabulary driven, i.e., they focus on too much vocabulary way much too quickly. The stories become rather long and have too many unfamiliar words in them, thereby, disrupting reading flow.
As a result of this discussion, I have decided to add a Story Library section to my blog (this can be found in the top menu), which are the stories which I wrote and used with my Latin 1 students this semester. This Story Library page is still a work in progress and by no means are the stories 100% representative of Comprehenisble Input. You can see, however, my attempts at writing a CI-based story and what elements I tried to incorporate.
Hope this will motivate others to write and to publish their CI-based stories online.
Thank you for this! I have a student who dropped Spanish to take online Latin through the local university and I'd love to pass your stories along to him for extra fun practice. (This is a kid who reportedly read his history textbook from cover to cover, so reading stories in Latin would definitely count as 'fun' for him!)
ReplyDeleteHi, many thanks for all the work you put into sharing your approach to teaching Latin! I'm not a teacher, discupulus sum. But I've appreciated reading through many of your posts to get ideas about how to improve my self-directed learning.
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