After sharing the strong start to the year from just the first 12 minutes of day 1, and results of a textbook comparison from the first 4 weeks, I’ve now got some stats from Quarter 1. Having arrived at the first 10 week mark of the year (36 hours), the total words read is now 6,500. But that figure isn’t really what I find most remarkable. How about the fact that 39% of the total input was read in just these last two weeks, from novellas alone…

That is, the Latin that students were exposed to from the first 6 chapters in Rūfus lutulentus, just 4 Expanded Readings from its companion Rūfus et Lūcia: līberī lutulentī, and all of Quīntus et nox horrifica accounts for 39% of the input received all year! What is more, most students finished the remaining chapters of Rūfus lutulentus on their own, and made considerable progress on Rūfus et Lūcia: līberī lutulentī, which means that I’m only reporting the *minimum* Latin read, and that’s a lot. N.B. other input isn’t factored since it varies student to student during independent reading time, thus far amounting to 64 minutes of Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) of the same text, and 143 minutes of Free Voluntary Reading (FVR) of any text they chose from their folders.

Now, I’m not discounting any of the class texts we co-created, or typed up during Write & Discuss, or the first Movie Talk we watched and read. Those were necessary. But we’re now at a point to really ramp up the input having had a solid foundation of comprehension and frequent vocabulary, and all the “bells & whistles flavor text” that appeared in descriptions of student interests and helped create program buy-in (re: essential questions “Who am I/Who are we?”). Now, we can move on to reading the most comprehensible of texts available for beginning students, novellas written with sheltered vocabulary, and explore Roman content (re: essential question “Who were the Romans?”) further.

I share these stats knowing that many Latin teachers are unaccustomed to writing Latin with their students. Until that becomes more of a common practice, novellas are a considerable source of input. See this living document for ways to use novellas.