Curriculum

Free Voluntary Reading (FVR) Myths & Starting Your Library For $0 – $250

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Myth 1 – “My students aren’t ready.”
Face it, this is a myth. Your students might not be ready to spend 15min/day reading 300-word, 5k length novels, but they’re probably ready to begin self-selecting short texts like class stories to read very early on. Once you have about 5-10 class stories, make some booklets and start FVR for a few minutes 1x/week. For this reason, I intend to make TPRS a priority early in the year after some TPR. In the past, I’ve built this up too much, spending a whole class or two on a story. My new plan is more shorter stories, at least 2/week.

Myth 2 – “There aren’t enough resources.”
Curating that collection of class stories takes care of this second myth, at least for a while. Also, don’t forget about writing/adapting short texts yourself!

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Pīsō perturbātus: Published!

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Hot on the heels of Drūsilla et convīvium magārum published last month, Pīsō perturbātus is the latest to emerge from the Pisoverse. It fills the need of beginning texts to read, and is on par with Rūfus et arma ātra, yet a couple hundred words longer. This book is silly, whimsical even, and completely inspired by the letters P and Q (and C)! Before he can actually compose poetry, and before even Rufus is around, Piso is seen as a very young boy with the crankiness of an old man. Oh, and there’s literally A LOT of alliteration!

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Piso minds his Ps and Qs..(and Cs…and Ns and Os) in this alliterative tongue-twisting tale touching upon the Roman concepts of ōtium and negōtium. Before Piso becomes a little poet, early signs of an old curmudgeon can be seen.

Pīsō perturbātus can be read by the novice student known to curiously continue comprehending even the campiest content in the classroom. It has a unique word count of 36 (excluding different forms of the same word, names, and meaning established within the text), nearly all of which can be found in the novella’s final sentence of Ciceronian length!

Pīsō perturbātus is 1450 words in total length, and even features two nearly completed lines of dactylic hexameter. It’s available…

1) This weekend’s CANE’s Annual Meeting, University of RI, March 16-17
2) Classroom Set Specials (up to $80 off!)
3) On Amazon
4) As a free preview through Chapter 4 (of 8)
5) Email me for Purchase Orders and classroom set discounts

Drūsilla et convīvium magārum: Published!

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Here’s the latest compelling, comprehensible text written with sheltered (i.e. limited) vocabulary to provide more understandable reading material for the beginning Latin student. Drūsilla et convīvium magārum features mages (i.e. witches, sorcerers, etc.), serpents, a dinner party, peacocks, and potentially pooping in a cooking-pot (fūfae! = gross!). Fun for everyone, right?

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Drūsilla is the longest Pisoverse novella to date, finishing at over 3400 total words in length. That’s over 500 words longer than Pīsō Ille Poētulus, but with half the vocab! It’s the first Pisoverse novella to venture into magic and the occult, making for quite the compelling narrative, yet still within the context of ancient Rome.

Drusilla lives next to Piso. Like many Romans, she likes to eat, especially peacocks! As the Roman army returns, she awaits a big dinner party celebrating her father’s homecoming. One day, however, she sees a suspicious figure give something to her brother. Who was it? Is her brother in danger? Is she in danger?

Drūsilla et convīvium magārum contains 58 unique words (excluding names, different forms of words, and meaning established within the text), and works well with any Roman daily life unit (e.g. home, family, food, etc.) in Latin class.

Drūsilla et convīvium magārum is available…

1) Classroom Set Specials (up to $80 off!)
2) On Amazon
3) As a free preview of the first 7 chapters (of 17)
4) Email me for Purchase Orders and classroom set discounts

Super Posters (Sweet Sēdecim)

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I recently updated my classroom posters as part of the Universal Language Curriculum (ULC). I now intend to focus more deliberately on those top 16 verbs each year, every year, using whatever else is needed for communication given various topics.

Here’s the next update…Super Posters!

 

 

These new posters not only have all the plural forms, but also the past tense on the back when printed double-sided! Now, I use the past tense aaaaaaaaall the time, right from the first day of Latin 1! In fact, there’s no legitimate reason not to when teaching in a comprehension-based communicative classroom (i.e. shelter vocabulary, not grammar). Usually, my signal for past tense (i.e. hand over shoulder) is enough to convey the meaning, but these new Super Posters will be particularly helpful when there’s a completely different-looking word (i.e. stem-change). My signal works, but there are those who would prefer to have the plural forms written as well. As such, I’ve added them as another set of posters, present tense, and plural. However, these words get quite long for a highly inflected language like Latin, so I won’t be using them, myself.

Capture

The plural forms of this word are quite long, and harder to see from the back of the room.

Due to that clutter from some verbs, my own plan is to continue posting the original ones with only singular. So, where do the Super Posters come into play? They’ve now become the laminated ones I hand out to students. In addition to holding up the poster when I use that verb, the student can flip it when they hear the past tense. Also, I can use one of these as-needed instead of writing any form students don’t understand.

I hope you find a use for these Super Posters, too!

N.B. Latin has a few past tenses. The most frequently used one, the perfect tense, has a completed aspect (like the Spanish preterite). The imperfect tense, with a continuous aspect, is used all the time, too. I chose mostly the perfect forms, especially since those can be completely different-looking from the present forms. Still, there are a few words I use mostly in the imperfect, so I included “erat” instead of “fuit,” and “sciēbat” instead of “scīvit.” If you want different tenses of any of these, make a copy of the Google doc and edit as you see fit. After all, these posters are to help YOU make Latin more comprehensible, and that might vary across different contexts.

Universal Language Curriculum (ULC) & Sweet Sēdecim (Sweet 16) Reboot

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I’ve just decided to drop Obligation from the Awesome Octō (i.e. is, has, wants, likes, goes + says, thinks, owes/should), and replace it with Knowledge (i.e. knows/doesn’t know). Here are all the posters.

This is the first step towards updating and embracing the Sweet Sēdecim (+ sees, hears, comes, leaves, brings, puts, gives, is able) that many successful language teachers have been using for quite some time. The result will be focusing on a slightly larger core vocabulary—instead of just the top 8—over a longer period of time. These top 16 naturally occur across many communicative contexts. Thus, the Universal Language Curriculum (ULC) is born.

In a nutshell, though…

  1. Can be used for ANY target language
  2. Curriculum is based on expanding vocabulary
  3. Content is driven by communication and student interests
  4. A repeating single-year organized into 2 units

Unit 1 Content, Years 1 – 4 (ACTFL’s Communication, Connections, and Communities)
“Who am I?”
“Who are we?”

  • Community: town(s), school, landmarks
  • Family: members, origin/ancestry, home
  • Self: age, likes/dislikes, wishes

Unit 2 Content, Varies each year (ACTFL’s Communication, Cultures, and Comparisons)
“Who were the target language speakers?”

  • establish suggested topics and poll students

Unit Test “Mastery” (UTM)

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Unit Test “Mastery” (UTM) is a symptom many teachers and students suffer from. The teacher:

  1. presents content (Present)
  2. provides a learning experience (Practice)
  3. announces an assessment
  4. assesses students (Produce)
  5. chooses remediation based on low performance, or moves on
  6. repeat

The consequences of UTM is that students appear to “master” the content either right away or after the remediation, which itself is usually misinterpreted as assisting a “struggling student.” The teacher then moves on, and students seldom run into the same content, even from what you might expect from cumulative courses (e.g. one-off math/science concepts, or that perfunctory “transportation unit” in which students are given a vocabulary list for all possible—and likely outdated—ways to get around Madrid, etc.).

This symptom seriously misleads the teacher. It’s one source of validating teaching practices that don’t actually produce results they seem to be producing. For example, most language teachers attribute their understanding of language to how they were taught, yet they’ve probably just been exposed to the language daily over time, teaching similar (same?) content year after year. This looks like proficiency, yet is probably just daily recall of translated and memorized information!

In reality, communication isn’t really something anyone can master, at least not in the subject-matter-learning sense used in other content areas. There’s a lot of pressure to make language courses fit what’s expected in school, but the model fails when we have inclusive classrooms based on universal human traits, and not intellectualizing language. The best teachers are able to resist that, educating their administration, or at least find the wiggle room to provide input and encourage interaction in a second language during the school day—something all humans are hardwired for.

I encourage everyone to find alternatives to traditional units accompanied by lessons with limited flexibility. Instead, meet students where they are, and move forward. One way to think about curriculum is basing it on vocabulary frequency, but not thematic (e.g. Greetings, Getting Around, Sports, etc.). Chris Stolz has shares how Mike Peto’s entire department has taken this to an extreme with fantastic results! All of these ideas are supported by what Eric Herman has coined “Forward Procedure:”

“Forward procedure is process-oriented. It focuses on where students are. That doesn’t mean you can’t have tests, but those are not pre-determined. They are created in response to what has happened in class and tailored to where students are. If there had to be an element of “standardization” between sections, this would be to agree to use the same test format, but not the same content (e.g., sections hear a different story and do a timed rewrite). Rather than focus on something to cover, it focuses on giving students what they want and need in that moment to learn. It is the approach that makes a teacher most responsible to the learner. In a second language, communicative classroom, this is a much better fit. To quote Savignon (1976): “Above all, remember that for it to be real, communication must be a personalized, spontaneous event. It cannot be programmed – but you can make it happen” (p. 20).

Infusing Myth: Chris Stolz’ Story Strategies

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My curriculum map reflects how I focus on the familiar theme/essential questions of “Who am I? Who are we?” before moving onto the less-familiar distant past of ancient Romans; the rationale being that once students have had decent exposure to the Latin, they can begin reading about the target culture IN the target language, which is actually how those 4 Cs are supposed to be met (i.e. Communication in the target language is required for Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities).

Still, we know that students already find myth compelling. As such, consider this simple strategy to sprinkle class stories with a bit of mythology, avoiding an isolated “Olympian Gods/Goddesses Unit,” which seems to be just as perfunctory as “The Roman Villa”…

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HQ (High-Quantity) Reading & Pisoverse Vocab

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One Second Language Acquisition (SLA) idea is that teachers mostly control only the quantity and quality of input—the sine qua non of language acquisition—with the learner’s internal syllabus acting as a major constraint. Conventionally, Latin teachers have been preoccupied with quality of Latin over quantity, which is likely the opposite of how to acquire a language! Furthermore, quality* has different interpretations, especially concerning its comprehensibility.

Recently, John Piazza has been promoting HQ (High-Quantity) Reading—of texts students understand—on the Latin Best Practices Facebook group, and with good reason. Blaine Ray’s recommendation is reading 32 pages a week (half in school, half at home) beginning in the 3rd year, which is quite the challenge for a profession lacking a high quantity of understandable reading material (i.e. texts written with a reasonable number of words, and NOT what some consider appropriate texts)! Right now, there are a couple of ways Latin teachers are working towards that goal…

1) Novellas
2) Writing personalized texts

There are about 17 novellas written with sheltered vocabulary for the beginning student, which I’ve been updating on a list, here. These novellas are ready-to-go sources of more understandable input than has ever been available in the past, offering thousands of Latin words for students to read in compelling contexts. As an author of some of those texts, I can share some stats. At this point in the Pisoverse, there are 4 novellas, and 2 readers. This winter, there will be a 5th novella of 58 unique words, which will end up being the longest in the Pisoverse at over 3000 total words! These 8 texts are written with just 300 unique words across them all—a reasonable amount for students to understand by their third year, no doubt containing some new words (because high-frequency is context-dependent). The total word count of these 8 texts is over 16,600. That’s a lot of Latin—twice as much, in fact, since this past October! So, the Pisoverse alone is just one huge source towards the 32 pages/wk goal in the third year. Approx. half of that Latin is available completely free for projecting/printing on each publication’s blog post,which you can find on the Novellas tab.

The other option is to write personalized texts for your own students. Here, “personalized” could mean texts based on details learned in class about the students themselves, or adapted ancient texts on topics that students are interested in. Writing personalized texts for your students daily is one way to provide copious amounts of CI. This is a high-leverage practice, and doubles as the least expensive option (yes, novellas are inexpensive, but 5 copies of all current 17 could run $500. This is quite low when it comes to classroom resources, yet remains a hard sell in underfunded programs in which teachers haven’t yet advocated for text budgets like ELA courses). So, writing personalized texts is one inexpensive way to provide the most comprehensible reading material, yet it also might require ditching some practices teachers ASSUME they must do, yet contribute very little to acquisition:
  • Instead of creating worksheets…
  • Instead of designing a 1-2 page quiz…
  • Instead of grading quizzes at home, or during planning time…
  • Instead of creating a translating activity…

…write personalized texts daily for your students!

Not sure where to begin when it comes to writing for the Novice? Read this, this, and this!

*Quality is usually synonymous with Latīnitās, which will be debated ad nauseum, ad inferōs, and beyond, yet another take on quality of input is in the richness and clarity of meaning. The ancient unadapted short sentences found in “Wheelock’s” and “Learn to Read Latin” textbooks hold very little meaning for the beginning student—not to mention some degree-holders—which calls into question the quality of input if only few can understand that level of Latīnitās. After all, even the best examples of single-sentence Ciceronian Latin can be meaningless to most! Quality, then, can be seen as messages that hold a great deal of meaning, and not just messages of a particular style consistent with great ancient authors. 

 

fragmenta Pīsōnis: Published!

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Here are 50 new lines of poetry including dactylic hexameter, hendecasyllables, and scazon (i.e. limping iambics)!

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This collection of poetry from the Pisoverse features a prose description of what inspired Piso’s poetry prior to each verse itself. This provides context and exposure to the words found in each verse, adding to its comprehensibility. Despite the lack of a single continuous plot, students should find fragmenta Pīsōnis more readable than the Pīsō Ille Poētulus novella, especially with any background knowledge from reading the other, much easier novellas in the Pisoverse (i.e. Rūfus lutulentus, Rūfus et arma ātra, and Agrippīna: māter fortis). The poetry in this collection includes more “big content words” to clearly convey meaning. fragmenta Pīsōnis can be used as a transition to the Pīsō Ille Poētulus novella, or as additional reading for students already comfortable with poetry having read the novella. The only new word added to the 96 word count from the entire Pisoverse is fragmentum. This collection is 2200 words in total length.

Use fragmenta Pīsōnis as a Free Voluntary Reading (FVR) option, read as a whole class together, or introduce each fragment as “poetry of week.”

fragmenta Pīsōnis is available…

1) Classroom Set Specials (up to $80 off!)
2) On Amazon
3) As a free preview of the first section (includes 12 lines of poetry) (text only)
– Poetry of the Week (free audio files to use)
4) Email me for Purchase Orders and classroom set discounts

12 Days of CI & Wall Talk

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We’re 1/3 of the way through the school year. Doesn’t that make you tingle? And why shouldn’t it? In my experience, no matter how much anyone enjoys what they do, everyone just wants to go home at the end of the day, and especially at the end of the school year! 

Here is what my Word Walls look like after 12 classes (Latin 1x/wk):

Notice the variation amongst all three, despite a core set of words used throughout. These Word Walls represent “high frequency” as a concept. Even after watching and discussing the same MovieTalk, each class has its own identity…

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