Over the 55 hours of CI starting in September up to the holiday break, students read on their own for 34 total minutes of Sustained Silent Reading (SSR), and 49 minutes of Free Voluntary Reading (FVR)…
Continue readingQuīntus et nox horrifica—a scary story even Latin 1 students can understand with ease!
It’s one of my favorites, and is here just in time for Halloween. This latest Pisoverse novella clocks in at 52 unique words (excluding names, different forms, and meaning established in the text), but uses 26 super clear cognates. In fact, this will be the very first novella we read in my classes in about a month, with Rūfus lutulentus (20 words), and the others to follow. Quīntus et nox horrifica is available…
1) Amazon
2) Free Preview (first 4 of 8 chapters, no illustrations)
June & July have seen several additions to the Pisoverse. With the low unique word counts and numerous cognates included throughout, the novellas now provide over 28,700 total words for the beginning Latin learner to read! That’s with a vocabulary of just 360 unique words across all texts! Here are the latest publications:
This is not an audiobook with sound effects or music. It’s not just narration. It’s definitely not repeat-after-me.
This release is part of a new series of audio, Learning Latin via, planned for other Pisoverse novellas. This series assumes a listener with ZERO prior Latin can maintain comprehension and confidence while listening to any book! If you listen to this while following along with the novella (or maybe even without the text!?), you WILL start to pick up Latin.
The audio to accompany Agrippīna: māter fortis is the first offered in the series. There are over 1500 Latin messages, some of which are comprised of 10+ words—none of that isolate word-list, or “repeat-after-me” stuff! This contains 6 hours of Latin! Each chapter has the following 3 tracks:
Following Carol Gaab, and M & M (i.e. Mira Canion & Martina Bex), here’s a quick post on how I’ve organized the Pisoverse. While those authors have hundreds of titles to address, I have just 8, and they’re much smaller in scope. After all, I write novellas, not novels. Still, there is method to my madness…
With students meeting 1x/week—this year only—we just had the 30th class of the year. I compared this to our calendar for next year, which is as if it’s October 9th meeting every day of the week. Now, with constant reminders of routines (since at least one week passes from class to class), and typical testing/school interruptions, and Northeast snow, those 30 class hours could amount to fewer total hours of input (25, 20, 15?!). Total input hours is tough to calculate, though, so we’ll just stick with 30 for the purpose of this post! What does that mean for reading? Cue the first novella…
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!
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!
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
Magister P. 