Stultus

This is a great post choral reading idea which I got from James Hosler, a fellow CI Latin teacher in Ohio. It is really simple but goes a long way!

Following a choral reading of a story:

1. Give the laser pointer to a dependable student (one who understands Latin word order well) and ask that student to point to the words of the story which you just read through together.
2. Now YOU the teacher will translate the sentence aloud into English, as the class listens and watches.
3. The difference is that you will deliberately make some mistakes (either vocabulary or form) when translating aloud
4. When students hear you make a mistake, they will yell Stultus or Stulta, depending on your gender (or maybe some kinder word).
5. You as the teacher will make the necessary correction and then move on.

Observations

1. Students really get into this. When I first tried this out, I was not sure how they would respond but gosh, they loved yelling "stultus" at me.
2. Because students had the opportunity to call me stupid in Latin, they really paid attention to the story and to my translation
3. This was a great way to do some pop-up grammar when I made a mistake
4. This was another way to get students to read through the story in a different way
5. This was a great way to use the words stultus/callidus in a context, because if I get a sentence correct, I say, "Ha, ego non sum stultus, sed callidus!" or when students correct me, I say, "Babae, vos estis callidissimi!" 

Choral Reading

When reading through a story together as a class, one technique to use is group choral reading/translation. This will require:

• projecting the story onto a screen
• a laser pointer

When you think that the class is familiar enough with the vocabulary and language structures of a particular story, project that story onto a screen. As the teacher, read the first Latin sentence aloud to the class, using the laser pointer to point to each word as you read it left to right. THEN have the students as a group chorally translate that sentence into English, while you, using the laser pointer, point to the Latin words IN AN ENGLISH WORD ORDER. After that, move onto the next sentence, repeating the process.

Now some of you may be objecting, "Hey, I thought the idea was to get away from translating Latin into English. This does not seem very CI." And quite honestly, I had some reservations about it too in the beginning. The difference, however, is that this activity is not our primary goal: All we are trying to do is establish meaning. This is why according to Bloom's Taxonomy, translation is a low-level skill.  Translating itself is not my end goal activity, but rather it is a step towards a post-reading activity in the language. NOTE - though translating may require higher level skills in order to establish meaning, the end result is still the original product just in a different language; no new product has been created in the target language, which is the sign of critical thinking.

Observations

1. Doing a translation into English helps establish meaning. Yes, I want students to be able to work with Latin in Latin, but it can become very easy for students to answer Latin comprehension questions about a story without needing to understand what is being communicated if they are savvy enough, e.g., a quis question usually is answered by the subject, a quid agit question is answered by the verb, etc. 
2. In doing a choral translation, no one is put on the spot. Therefore, students' affective filters are low.
3. Following the laser pointer in both Latin and in English helps students to see the structure of the Latin language but yet how we must construe it in English in order to establish meaning.
4. Translating chorally is a way for students to help each other out. If a student does not know a word or form, they hear others saying it.
5. Choral translations are a great time to do pop-up grammar/grammar timeouts, since everyone is focused on the screen.
6. Translating a story together aloud from a screen is so much better than having students read it from a book in front of them. In a choral translation, I am able to see students' eyes and to hear their voices. If I do not hear enough students translating aloud together, then I will call them on it.

Sheltering Vocabulary

In 1960, Bennett Cerf, the co-founder of Random House Publishing Company, bet Theodore Geisel that he could not write a children's book using only 50 different words. Geisel undertook this task and under the pseudonym Dr. Seuss, he wrote the book Green Eggs and Ham. And yes, only 50 unique words are used in the entire book.

Theodore Geisel's Green Eggs and Ham is a perfect example of the TPRS mantra "Shelter/Limit Vocabulary, not Grammar," and it is this mantra which really rubs a lot of teachers the wrong way. "What? Shelter/limit vocabulary? A language does not consist of a few words and nor does it exist in a vacuum! The more words which a student knows, the better he/she will be able to communicate or to read!" And yes, there is some degree of truth in that: we do indeed want our student to be able to communicate and to read. The issue at hand though is that we overload our students with WAY TOO MUCH vocabulary all at once, while forcing them to learn language structures at the same time. The result: they end up knowing neither well. 

If you were to ask your students of any level of Latin which vocabulary words they knew best, most likely they would respond with words from the beginning weeks of Latin 1 - for my students, even if they were AP students, those words would be the CLC stage 1 words: pater, mater, servus, filius, canis, tablinum, atrium, culina, hortus, via, triclinium, est, scribit, bibit, sedet, laborat, dormit, etc. And though shocking at first since these students are three years removed from Latin 1 and have "learned" so many more words since then, at the same time, it is not surprising. Why? Because those limited words are repeated over and over in their readings in the opening weeks in various configurations, therefore, students really have no choice but to internalize/acquire them. After that, though, the curriculum becomes a mad dash of overloading them with a massive amount of new low-frequency vocabulary words while introducing new language structures. To quote my friend Evan Gardner, founder of Where Are Your Keys?, as a result, students end up "burning unnecessary memory bandwidth."    

Now focusing on a limited amount of vocabulary does not mean that no new vocabulary is ever introduced but rather, that the amount is controlled and that the choice of words is deliberate. This allows for continued repetitions and when that word is introduced in a new language structure, students can solely focus on the form - and if the context is comprehensible, it may not even be necessary for students to focus on the form, since the word just "translates itself" due to context. 

Just because the book picks various words for their "vocabulary list" does not mean that students must learn those particular words. On the average, CLC has around 35 words in its stage vocabulary lists - WAY too much, and in my opinion, around half of those words are not important. Though they may help a particular story, big picture, they are not used enough later on to merit having students know them.

So how does one limit vocabulary?

1. Focus on high-frequency vocabulary first. I will leave you to define "high-frequency," because to every Latin teacher, that will mean something different. For some it will mean the most commonly used words in classical literature, while for others, it will mean words which are most frequently used in a particular textbook series or in a story, and yet for others, it will mean those words which are most commonly used in any language itself (words such as be, want, have, give, take, go, etc).
2. Don't focus on cognates too much. Again, students can "burn unnecessary memory bandwidth" in learning cognates. Now if like French, the word is a faux amis (false friend) and not a cognate but looks like one, then definitely focus on the word.
3. Once you determine the words on which you will focus, then these will be your foundation for TPR, TPRS, etc. 
4. Once students have acquired these words, then these particular words will become the ones which you will use to introduce new language structures. Again, this way students will only have to focus on the form, not the meaning of the word AND the new structure.

Even though vocabulary has been limited, it is still possible to create engaging and compelling stories with a few words. Look at Green Eggs and Ham!

The End of the School Year Reflections

School ended for students this past Thursday, with the graduation ceremony taking place that evening. Yesterday was my one day of post-planning. The gradebooks have all been finalized. Textbooks have all been stored. My classroom is all packed up for the summer, awaiting my eventual return the last week of July. I am officially now on summer vacation.

So with the school year still fresh in my mind, I wanted to devote this post to my thoughts on my first true year of creating a Comprehensible Input based classroom. 

On the one hand, I see my drastic failures: 

1. still treating Latin as if it were simply re-translated English and not as a communicative language
2. days where students did not hear a word of spoken Latin from me because I was focusing on culture, grammar, etc or just did not feel like speaking Latin
3. rushing through material in order to catch up on lost time due to missing seven days on account of snow
4. not getting enough student interaction with Latin through comprehensible repetitions, circling types of questions, PQAs, etc
5. times where I could have done a TPRS story with students but chose not to because I was tired or burned out
6. times where I ended up doing grammar-translation lessons because they seemed easier for me than doing a CI lesson
7. at times not really having a true goal of where I was going with CI
8. times where I could have better engaged students and drawn them in through comprehensible, compelling material
9. still sheltering grammar but not vocabulary
10. focusing on intensive readings which had way too much vocabulary and language

But at the same time, I made it through an entire school year of trying to incorporate Comprehensible Input into my Latin classroom! For me, that is a tremendous victory. And quite honestly, this was no small task.

I see so many small victories throughout the year. This past year was quite an interesting one. I was in a situation where the majority of my students had never had me as their Latin teacher (there are 2 other teachers at my school who do not use CI), so these students had little to no experience with oral Latin/CI. I was also not teaching Latin 1 this year, where teaching Latin using CI would not have been a big deal for them since they would not known anything different, but how was this going to fly with students who already had 1-2 years of non-CI Latin under their belts? My major concern was my Latin 3s, because as they did not know me, I knew that I would be viewed as the “evil stepparent.” I was concerned about how to implement anything related to CI with them – these students were great Latin translators, could parse the heck out of words, knew their forms and charts, but in their minds, that was what Latin was. Therefore, my plan for them was simply this: to love them exactly where they were at. This meant making them feel successful with what they already know (even if meant parsing!) and introducing CI to them gradually, lest they rebel against me. And quite honestly, it worked, because many of them began to warm up BIG TIME to CI. I remember once while doing a TPRS story with them, they kept coming up with idea after idea for where the story should go. When playing the Word Chunk game and using vocabulary and language structures which I had used in a dicatio and TPRS a few days prior, I recall being absolutely floored that they had no problem translating “heard-Latin” into English. I recall a number of students saying to me, “Hearing Latin is really not that hard. I thought it was going to be really difficult.” I responded to them, “Well, good then, that means that I am doing my job of making Latin understandable to you.” When I was observed in one of these Latin 3 classes where I was telling a TPRS story, the observer said to me afterwards, “Wow, your students really like you.” All of these small victories translate into one great one for me.

I am reminded of something which I wrote in my second post "Getting Started with CI" about celebrity environmentalist Ed Begley Jr., who, whenever he is asked about ways in which folks can be more "green," always responds, "Pick the low hanging fruit first...Once you master those activities (which are easy to do) and they become part of your daily habit, then move onto bigger things." I realize how true that statement is, because "picking the low hanging fruit" is exactly what I did this year. Through making a concerted effort of incorporating dictationes, embedded readings, TPRS, timed writes, One Word Pictures, free writes, limiting vocabulary, Read/Draw, word chunk game and so many other CI techniques into my curriculum, they actually do seem like habit to me now. In other words, as I now have a year's worth of CI foundation on which to build and as those activities have now become engrained in my teaching routine, next year I can better address my "failures" listed above and add so many more new techniques to my arsenal in addition to what I was already doing. Also, my mindset has changed, as I am really starting to view my teaching from a CI perspective. 

So I am grateful for these next two months away from the classroom as I regroup and recoup, but at the same time, I am excited for where I will go with CI next year. 

I will continue to post here throughout the summer. After only 6 months of this blog, I already have 7300 page views. Who the heck is reading this? I am grateful to all of you who read this and hope that we can support each other in our journey into a Comprehensible Input based classroom.

1-3-10 Timed Free Write

Here is another timed free write activity which I found on Martina Bex's website, and I absolutely love it. It is another way to get students to write in the target language as a timed write, and it truly lowers their affective filter.

1. Give students a prompt about which they will write (either an actual written prompt or a picture for them to describe or to narrate the action). Doing 15-minutes of One-Word-Picture just prior to this can be very helpful, because since the class is the one who created the picture, the description of the picture should be fresh in their minds.
2. Give them one minute to begin writing - if I have given them a prompt, writing the actual prompt is part of the timed write.
3. After one minute, tell them to stop, to draw a line under what they have written and to count up the number of words which they have written. They are to put that number in a box off to the side of their one-minute timed write.
4. Now tell them that they have three minutes to write but that they are to re-copy what they wrote down for one-minute as part of the three-minute write.
5. After three minutes, tell them to stop, to draw a line under what they have written and to count up the number of words which they have written for three minutes. They are to put that number in a box off to the side of their three-minute write.
6. Now tell them that they have ten minutes to write but that they are to re-copy what they wrote down for three minutes as part of the ten-minute write. NOTE - my students are not quite up to doing a full free-write for ten minutes, so I give them seven minutes. The goal is to build up to a full ten minutes.
7. After ten minutes, tell them to stop and to count up the number of words which they have written for ten minutes. They are to put that number in a box off to the side of their ten-minute write.
8. I have them title the timed write "1-3-10" for future reference. I collect it and put it in their timed write portfolio for their end-of-the-semester self-evaluation.

Observations

• Instead of just jumping into an extended timed write, the one-minute write and then the three minute write served as a warmup for students. They had time to gather their thoughts and to transition to writing in Latin.
• Rewriting what they had already written gave them subconscious repetitions.
• The amount of words written in one-minute compared to three minutes was double for all students, and in some cases, was triple. The amount of words written in three minutes compared to seven minutes was double for all students, and in some cases, was triple and quadruple. 

BINGO Free Write

If there is ever a game in which students become incredibly competitive, it is BINGO. They can play this for HOURS. I have always enjoyed playing a game of Vocabulary BINGO with students, but at the same time, I felt that it was incredibly limited. We were dealing with isolated forms and vocabulary with nothing really in terms of a context, but at the same time, if I tried to impose too much in trying to create a context for the words during the game, then it stopped being BINGO. The reason why BINGO is fun is its simplicity.

I found the following BINGO activity on Martina Bex’s website, and I absolutely love it. It combines the fun of playing BINGO with a timed free write. The Latin version is called VINCO. 

1. Create a 5x5 grid and over each column, put the letters V, I, N, C and O. I do not put a free space.
2. Write a list of 35 vocabulary words/forms with which students are very familiar due to their usage. I try to keep nouns in the nominative form, but I put verbs usually in the perfect tense (e.g., cantavit, adeptus est, affectus est, circumventus est). Prepositional phrases (e.g., in fuga), idiomatic expressions (e.g., re vera, sine dubio, nisi fallor), impersonal verbs (e.g., necesse est, difficile est), high frequency forms (e.g., voluit, poterat) and even specific forms (e.g., lacrimatura, bibitura) are good too.
3. Cut out strips of the 35 words and put them in a bag.
4. Give each student a VINCO grid and a list of the words. They are to pick 25 words from the list of 35 and to fill in the grid however they choose.
5. Play a normal game of BINGO by pulling out a vocabulary word and calling out the the English meaning. As I do not have beans for them to put on their square, student mark the spaces themselves. NOTE - you will not be calling out the letter of the column like you would in regular Bingo.
   
   VARIATION - create the 5x5 grid with specific words for each column. Students will have to pick 5 words from the V list to put in the V column, 5 words from the I list to put in the I column, etc. This way, then you call out the letter like you would in a regular BINGO game. For some reason, this is VERY important to students. In planning, you will now have to put the corresponding letter on the vocabulary strip so that you can call out both the letter and word.
   
   
6. When a student gets 5 in a row, then he/she yells out (and yes, I make them yell) "VINCO!" They read back to me the Latin words, and I give out a piece of candy. I usually keep playing a round until there are 4-5 winners. After that, we begin a new round. 
7. After playing 3-4 rounds of VINCO, now tell students to get out a sheet of paper and that they will be doing a timed free write
8. Using their VINCO paper, students are to pick 5 words in a row (horizontal, vertical or diagonal) and to write them at the top of their paper.
9. Explain to students that they are to now write a story based on the prompt that will incorporate all 5 words.
10. Show them the prompt, start the timer for however long you want them to write and then have them begin. 
11. When the time is done, much like a regular timed write, have students count their number of written words and put it in a box at the top of their paper.
12. Now in the free write itself, they are to put a box around their prescribed words which they had to incorporate in their story

Here is the prompt which I once used with my Latin 2's - it gave them a character, what she was doing, where she was and then a possible problem:

Rhonda erat in culina, cenam parans, cum subito magnum sonitum in cubiculo audivit. quid Rhonda egit?

Observations

1. Playing BINGO before the timed write made the timed write not seem like a major task.
2. Some students did not like having to incorporate the 5 words into their timed write, because they had to manipulate them into their story, and their words seemed random.
3. Most students liked having to incorporate the 5 words into their timed write, because it gave them more structure with which to work. They actually liked having to find a way to incorporate these random words into the story and to manipulate the writing for this purpose.
4. Some wished to have seen the prompt prior picking their 5 words. I will do that in the future.
5. If students do not incorporate all 5 words, tell them it is okay. It could have been that the 5 words were just too random to fit into a story based on the prompt or it could signal that they need more time

I only play VINCO three times a semester so this another way in which I can get students to do a timed write

Writing in Latin, part 3 - Student-Created Comprehensible Readers

This is part 3 in a continuing series on getting students to write in the target language.

So after students have done a timed write, what can you as the teacher do with their writings? I got this idea from Kristin Duncan's TPRSTeacher blog, which she in turn had gleaned from Judith Dubois's blog Ms. D's Funny Little Classroom.

The idea is to take some of the writings and simply to edit them for the class to read the next day, and by "edit," I mean "to correct any grammar errors in the the writing." You as the teacher type up the writings but do not change anything which has been written other than the forms for grammatical purposes or for comprehension. 

Some may say, "Students should not be writing if they are going to be making tons of errors." I suppose that one could argue that, but the purpose of this is to create some more COMPREHENSIBLE readings for students. Because these have been written by students, most likely they do not include any random vocabulary which have not been acquired yet, i.e. the writings are written by students for students at a student-level. And remember: my role in this is purely as editor. The writer Oscar Wilde supposedly, when he was sending off a manuscript to his publishers, penned a note to them, saying "I’ll leave you to tidy up the woulds and shoulds, wills and shalls, thats and whichs, etc.”

The following is an example of a timed write which I had my Latin 3 students do. The text in bold is a story which I had written: first, I read it aloud to them and acted it out - any new words or forms (such as the future participle) were written on the board and whenever I came to that word, I pointed to it on the board to establish meaning; second, the class received a paper copy of the story and we read through it together, with a choral translation of it and me asking comprehension questions in Latin about the story; third, students did a 25-minute Read and Draw of the story; fourth, finally students did a 10-minute timed write of the story, using their Read/Draw pictures - when they finished, they were to continue writing what they thought happened next. I then edited their "what happened next?" part and as a class, the next day, we read through them together. What follows are five student-written, teacher-edited conclusions of the story.

Jenny erat in culina, cantans et coquens libum, quod erat dies natalis Susanis. Jenny erat positura saccharum in libo, cum subito, Cindy culinam ingressa est. Cindy donum et venenum in mensa posuit. subito Cindy displosit, et Jenny obstupefacta est. putans venenum esse saccharum, Jenny venenum in libo posuit. libum ad Susanem a Jenny portatum est. Susan gaudio affecta est et erat consumptura libum. tum quid accidit?

1) cum Susan libum gustavisset, lacrimavit. Jenny rogavit, “quid accidit?” Susan dixit, “libum est pulchrum!” Jenny gaudio affecta est et gustavit libum. subito, Jenny displosit. Susan obsupefacta est, et consumpsit libum.

 2) Cindy intravit culinam. cucurrit ad Susanem et rapuit libum. tum Cindy deiecit libum in terra. Susan erat irata quod voluit consumere libum. “libum habet venenum!” Cindy clamavit. “Jenny voluit necare te!” loctua haec verba, Cindy petivit Jennyem. Jenny cucurrit e culina. “ego sum non homo quem tu intellexisti me esse!”

3) Cerberus culinam ingressus est, et Cindy in culina apparuit. Cindy clamat, “minime, libum venenum habet!” Jenny et Susan obstupefacti sunt. “estne venenum in libo?” dixit Susan. “ita vero,” respondit Cindy. Jenny tristitia affecta est, quod Susan erat consumptura libum, et libum habet venenum. Cerberus Jennyo appropinquavit, et prope eam sedit. Jenny gaudio affecta est. Susan risit (et dixit), “ego sum laeta, quod ego non sum mortua. Cindy, tu es amica. Jenny, tu es amica.”

4) Susan libum consumpsit et erat exanimata. Jenny obstupefacta est, et erat lacrimatura. tum Cindy decidit a caelo, et servavit Susanem. Susan affecta est gratitiā, et dixit, “maximas gratias ago, quod tu es meus heros!” Cindy explicavit quid accidisset. Susan et Jenny in animo volverunt cur Cindy portavisset donum cum veneno ad diem natalem. Cindy narravit rem. Cindy voluit necare porcum scelestum, sed obstructa erat a scelesto arbore. Cindy per silvam ambulavit…

5) subito Susan a Jenny pulsata est. irata, Susan Jennyem rogavit, “cur tu me pulsavisti? ego numquam te pulso!” Jenny Susanae dixit, “O Susan, re vera, tu est optima amica.” sed Jenny Susanem iterum pulsavit, et Susan humi decidit, mortua. nunc Susan (awoke) et putans esse fabulam mirabilem, libum laeta consumpsit. sed quod libum erat malum libum, Susan iterum humi decidit, mortua. Cindy apparuit, cacchinans!

Observations
1) Because everyone in the class took part in the timed write, it is a common experience for the class. The class knows what happened prior to the student-written endings, so they are eager to see what others wrote.

2) Because these writings are student-written, they are incredibly comprehensible to read. I do not even do an English translation of it when we read through them - we read them together in Latin as Latin - I don't ask any comprehension questions but simply read the stories aloud in Latin. What I love most is hearing students laugh as they read along with me, because it shows me that they are truly interacting with the language in the language.

3) Students actually get mad at me when I do not pick their writings for the class to read. I explain to them, "I pick 5-6 writings at random. Yours will be picked eventually."

4) In my editor role, I am able to see what kinds of grammatical errors which students are making; this shows me what I need to review or where I need to slow down to help acquisition.

5) I am absolutely floored at what students come up with when it comes to creating their own endings - they are so creative!