Strategies & Activities

MYSTĒRIUM: A Whodunnit Game In Latin

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**Updated 5.9.22 with a new Whodunnit and its folder**

My students have had a decent time playing our RPG lite “The Game” series, so I went looking for something else with more interaction and collaboration that first year language students could handle on their own without me leading it like The Game. I stumbled across this first-day History class activity from a while back. To be clear, I loath group work for the sake of group work, and have found a lot of it to be a near-complete waste of time. Therefore, I didn’t just want a “who dunnit?” kind of game that meant nothing with barely any Latin processed. I also loath tasks using language that’s way too hard for students to understand. It’s pointless and frustrating, for all of us. That all brought me to coming up with a series of clues and distractions, all using high frequency Latin that first year students could understand in the second half of the year.

The idea behind this whodunnit is for a group of students to reconstruct the events of something—usually not good, but doesn’t have to be violent or upsetting—from a collection of clues. For this first one, I went with a basic print & distribute, although you could treat it almost like an escape room with puzzles getting solved and clues being turned into the teacher in order to move on to the next puzzle. Too much work if you ask me, though. Here’s the basic outline of what I gathered:

  • Culprit & their motive
  • Real clues
  • Distractions (e.g., contradicting statements, alibis, etc.)
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BURNout vs. BOREout

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Someone online asked about routines last week or so, and I chimed in with my stock take about my own experience with things getting old, etc. and how the daily routine repeated weekly hasn’t worked out well for me in the past. A short while later, a friend gave pretty much the opposite advice. We’re both usually on the same page when it comes to prep and concern for burnout, so I was momentarily perplexed. Then it hit me: not only to teachers have to avoid burnout, but there’s also “boreout,” my word for stifling the joy in one’s day (for whatever reason). Both have the same outcome, which is leaving the profession at some point with a F^% it attitude. Quite plainly:

  • Too much planning = burnout
  • Too much of the same thing = boreout

For me, routines lead to boreout. I’ve done the Monday = X, and Tuesday = Y thing, but I haven’t had a daily school schedule making that possible for years. Last I did, though, the Monday “talk about weekend” thing got old. I’m not even talking about purely student interest, either. I got bored with it myself. I even get bored by the end of the third 84min. class plan that I teach straight in a row every other day, which is actually the fourth time I’ve taught it (i.e., four sections of Latin 1; one on A days, and the other three back-to-back on B days. Yeah, just put me to bed already, right?). It turns out that I’m prone to boreout just as much as burnout.

Daily routines and not-routines have a common goal. Both seek to avoid stressful, time-consuming, unnecessary planning. My friend has daily routines to reduce (eliminate?) all that. If Wednesday is always a quiz, Wednesday is always a quiz, right? For me, though, one thing I’ve run into is how even with a daily schedule, every Wednesday isn’t always a Wednesday. In fact, about 20% of the school year is irregular according to every calendar I’ve ever worked with given all the random days off, PD, snow days, testing, etc. That means one out of every five classes just…doesn’t happen. This displaces the routines and has caused me additional planning in the past. For example, if Wednesday is quiz day, and there’s no school Tuesday, it might not make sense to quiz anything.

Irregular weeks aside, even having a 2-week rotating activity schedule got old for me. I prefer a Talk & Read structure to every single class, as well as the “1-day-plan-ahead.” That is, each day, I look at a list of activities, noting what we haven’t done in a long time, etc., and plan for the following day. To be fair, I do roughly jot down the week’s possible agenda, or what I might want to do on Wed/Thurs, but it almost never quite stays the same once I get to the day before.

This also helps me be super-responsive to the class’ needs. For example, I did The Monitor Assessment recently and noticed far more incomprehension with one book’s chapter than the previous one. As a result, I adjusted by planning something to address all that in the next class. If I had the routines, and were expecting a quiz on Wednesday, that would’ve been harder to change things up. In sum, whatever time I spend picking out an activity or two for the next day and setting it up—which is usually 5-10 minutes—isn’t a problem for me. That certainly helps me avoid burnout, and has the benefit of keeping boreout at bay.

Skip The Quiz: Highlight Your Confusion

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I took this idea from Kelly Gallagher, the History teacher who wrote the “readicide” book. At some point, he started having kids read current news “articles of the week (AOW)” in groups and told them to work together and “highlight their confusion.” I honestly haven’t though about this in a decade, then it just popped into my head the other day. I realized this could be another “skip the quiz” assessment that gives us just as good data, if not better. The task was simple:

  1. In groups of 3-4, read the text (i.e., this week the full Pisces myth from signa zodiaca: vol. III).
  2. Highlight your confusion.

I handed out one text and one highlighter per group. To complete the simple task, students read and interacted, helping each other understand the story. I collected them for use the next class. What I got was a list of words and phrases nearly all groups didn’t know, and a few here and there that each group blanked on. That’s all I needed to make the language more comprehensible, discussing the text the next day and having a short list of words/phrases to park on. Here, “park” refers to a strategy of asking questions and restating answers while focusing on a part of the text that wasn’t as comprehensible (i.e., unknown words). This provides micro-exposure to the words in question, making subsequent reading go more smoothly.

Key Observations & Pedagogical Implications

  • This was a major confidence boost for students who might have doubted their ability to read a text of about 400 words long. Even the most-highlighted packet turned in had no more than 10 unknown words. These were level-appropriate texts. If, however, the packets I got back were marked up beyond belief, that’d tell me the full version couldn’t be read with any ease—the majority of class time and effort unnecessarily spent arriving at comprehension, not starting with comprehension and doing something more with it, prompting a new text or new level of the text. This is more valuable data than any quiz.
  • Students read the story together, receiving input once. Then, we read the story together as a class, students stopping me when we got to a place they highlighted. We discussed the story’s meaning, as well as any etymological connections to the unknown words, and whenever possible, additional input was provided through Q&A. Therefore between a) the first run through in groups with their discussion & rereading while negotiating meaning (because I monitored student interaction), b) the rereading the next day, and c) hearing the Q&A, I wouldn’t be surprised if this 400-word story ended up providing over 1,000 words of input over just two classes. I’ve never heard of any quiz with that much input.

Frontloading Vocab: Known/Unknown Anchor Chart

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I usually just read new novellas with students, cold-open. That is, besides reading the back cover description and having a quick discussion to situate the topic, there’s no prep, no fanfare. On occasion, I’ve had students do a little frontloading of some vocab on a Quizlet (and before that on Desmos during our remote year) to make the reading go more smoothly. I’ve also done that for certain chapters once we’ve already started reading, but again, there hasn’t been anything very structured ahead of time. It’s been mostly “just read,” all together, from the start.

Earlier this week, though, I stumbled upon a new way of starting a book together as a class. We began The Star Diaries, and to build on the intrigue and mystique of this book, I played into the mysterious details contained in the description. Here it is:

Not much was known about The Architects—guardians of the stars—until their diaries were found in dark caves sometime during the Tenth Age. Explore their mysterious observations from the Seventh Age (after the Necessary Conflict)—a time just before all evidence of their existence vanished for millennia! What happened to The Architects? Can you reconstruct the events that led to the disappearance of this ancient culture?

As you can see, we’ve got some knowns and unknowns right away. The Architects—are they even people?! They had diaries. There’s something called ages, and there were 10 of them. There was a Necessary Conflict. Was that a big war? The Architects vanished. How long was between Ages Seven and Ten?! How many 1,000s of years are we talking about?! They were an ancient culture. When is now?!

A simple nōta/īgnōta anchor chart really helped sort things out and set up the discovery later on. Students spent a couple minutes writing their own charts of what’s known and unknown right in their notebooks. When it came time to share, I wrote details in Latin on the board, using this time to establish meaning of 10 or so words we were about to read in the book.

COWATS & VOWATS

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These are two variations on Bob Patrick’s One Word At a Time Stories (OWATS). OWATS has been around for years, before the first novellas, in fact. I can’t say that I’ve done OWATS with much frequency, but it’s becoming more and more appealing when I scroll through various activities used to get texts.

COWATS
I liked the research Miriam Patrick shared on code-switched (CS) readings, so I wanted to give a scaled-back version a try. In addition to creating CS class texts earlier in the year alongside facing English and full glossary versions, I thought the format might work well with OWATS. It did. The format was to write a story—in English—incorporating one Latin word at a time. Observations:

  • I saw more cohesive stories.
  • Groups wrote more Latin than I expected (i.e., beyond just the one word).
  • The stories were easy to type up in the code-switch format.
  • I would choose one or two stories to type up entirely in Latin and share with the class.

VOWATS
This variation uses VERBA cards as the words given to students to create stories. It eliminates the prep of writing out words on paper, or creating a list, and also generates more variety (since students won’t be getting the same base of words). This could result in less repetition than COWATS or OWATS. For a tighter cluster of vocab, though, select a group of VERBA cards, keeping them in order as students come to you to get their next word. Have them write it down before heading back to their group, and then you’ll be handing out the same words to each group. Plus, zero prep besides choosing some words.

Latin Criticism: Two Broad Categories

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Two years ago, almost to the day, I wrote about Latin shaming in what’s turning out to be a quasi-annual public discussion on Latinity (i.e., quality of Latin). In 2020, the discussions concerned Latin spoken in the classroom as well as published works. This year, I’m told the focus is on novellas, which might have something to do with their proliferation. After all, in February of 2020 there were 52 books. Having doubled that number to 113 as of last week, and going from 18 author voices to 26, there’s a lot more different Latin being written now. Different Latin must lead to more opinions about that Latin. Granted, I haven’t been a part of these public discussions myself, but word gets around. Perhaps the 2023 panel on what it means to teach students to actually read Latin has spurred the latest round of things-Latīnitās. I have no idea for sure. Suffice to say that Latin shaming still plagues the profession. Instead of full-out shaming, though, this post sticks to general criticism. In my experience, there are two broad categories of criticism: that which matters, and that which doesn’t…

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Low-Prep Doesn’t Always Mean EZ

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Like usual, it took me a matter of minutes the other day to create the next day’s class agenda. Oh, you wanna know the trick to that? There are lots of them, but it all starts with a good grading system and ends with the basic Talk & Read format. Then, I try not to plan too far out knowing that something ALWAYS changes last-minute, and about 20% of our weeks aren’t even the typical schedule to begin with. I have a rough idea what’s coming up in following weeks, but never anything set in stone. Printing much ahead of time? Forget it. I’ve recycled WAY too many reams of no-longer-relevant activity sheets to know better. Anyway, I felt good about the time spent during my planning period, and had a solid idea of how class would go. The plans were simple and straightforward.

Yet, why was I exhausted by the end classes today?!

It turns out that low-prep isn’t always as easy as it seems to carry out. The good news is that it doesn’t take much more effort to avoid a draining class. In this post, you’ll find a list of the best low-prep AND low-energy-demanding activities generated from my input-based strategies & activities and how to get texts lists. Those lists have also been updated with the “EZ” code showing low-energy-demand typically required to carry them out.

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Quick Competition: Most Points Wins!

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Here’s a competitive reading activity I came up with on the fly the other day. You could consider it one of those “sneaky” re-reading strategies, almost like an annotation task, but more fun. It’s no frills, has an element of chance (like Lucky Reading Game), and adds a novel twist to reading any text. Here are the instructions I project:

  1. In your notebook, write down as many X as you can, in English.
  2. When the time is up, we’ll review, and you get a point for each detail the teacher calls out.
  3. Most points wins!

What’s “X?”
Anything you want. We just read about Sagittarius from sīgna zōdiaca Vol. II, so X was “facts about Sagittarius.” Students feverishly read through pages to scoop up details.

What Details Get Points?
Anything you want. In the zodiac example, I set a timer for 5 minutes, then started reading back from the beginning, making up points as I went (e.g., “If you wrote down something about Sagittarius being the 9th sign, give yourself a point). Just like The Monitor Assessment, I also gave points for details as a way to check comprehension.

What Do Students Win?
My go-to reward is “glory and honor,” which honestly is enough for students. Besides, they get a laugh out of the fanfare knowing I won’t try to bribe them into playing games with anything other than winning as the purpose.

DEBATE: Support The Statement (Sneaky Novella ReReading)

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I’ve done “support the statement” activities in the past, but none quite like this debate version that student teacher Caroline Spurr suggested. I highly recommend giving this a try. No, there are no points awarded. Just one side reads their quote (& page #), other side gets rebuttal, then repeat.

How do you find the argūmentum?!

Good Q! I’ll be on the lookout for specific debate topics from now on when we read every novella, but here are some general tips:

  • Come up with a question (e.g., Do the Romans and Egyptians value Marcus?), then one team rereads to find statements supporting a “yes” response, and the other “no.”
  • Go with something from the book students are already talking about (e.g., you hear “ugh, I hate Terrex. He’s the worst!” so you set up something like “Terrex is terrible vs. Terrex is not terrible”).
  • Turn qualities into a comparison (e.g., Who’s stronger?).
  • Compare two characters (e.g., Who’s more responsible, Piso’s mother or father?).
  • Choose a statement that falls under a theme found in the book, then one team rereads to find statements supporting it, and the other its negative.

Critical Thinking
Almost every student thinks that Olianna‘s family is cruel, with good reason since the book states that explicitly in several places! However, this novella debate builds evidence-seeking skills. We just told one half of the room to put aside their own thoughts and instead scour the pages for anything used to support the position that the family is not cruel. Although the unpopular opinion, every class was able to find at least some evidence, and they spent time rereading. This goes back to communicative purpose. Why did students reread? To prepare for a debate they found compelling to participate in. This was pure entertainment.

That particular debate topic of Olianna’s family being cruel was certainly stacked in one direction. However, the book ends with several prediction questions about the future, which is a common way I end my novellas to promote discussion. For the second debate, we had students vote on one of the questions. Half the class looked for quotes to support “yes” and the other half “no.”

The format is basically think | pair | share, with students a) spending time on their own rereading (sneaky, right?) and writing a quote and its page # in notebooks (FYI, notebook pics are great evidence of learning for gradebooks), b) pairing with group to discuss what they found, and then c) the debate.