I started the year by making sure that everyone had a basic understanding of what Latin is. I asked questions until we had established the following: a) it is a language, b) it is ancient, c) it was spoken by the Romans and some members of a vast Roman empire. I made it clear that you didn’t really need to know anything at all about Rome to learn Latin, but that they would learn a bit about Rome as they went.
I asked the class to put their hand up if they were a) super-dooper excited about learning Latin b) wish they didn’t have to learn Latin or c) were neither excited nor distraught at the thought of learning Latin, and happy to wait and see how it all panned out. I summarised the findings back to the class without judgement.
a) I told the class that they would begin by learning a Roman greeting, and that the Romans greeted their friends etc by ordering them to ‘Be well!’. I demonstrated this in English, pointing at individual students and saying ‘Be well!’ in an authoritarian tone. I then told them to practise in English, to tell three people sitting near them to ‘Be well.” This took about ten seconds.
b) I then told them that the Latin for this is Salve, and instructed them to greet three people again, this time in Latin. (At this point I mentioned that in Latin, v’s are pronounced as w’s and the word is spelt s-a-l-v-e).
c) I told them that salve worked for greeting one person, but to greet more than one, the Romans used Salvete. I demonstrated by saying hello to all of them, then asked them to pick a group and tell them all to be well. They did.
d) While I didn't do this, I could have shown them Disco 1, which covers this content.
I explained that we will begin each lesson with a short greeting, which they would copy into their book to use as a reference until they could do it from memory. As they copied it down, I asked them what they thought discipuli, magister and sodales might mean. We then ran through the greeting for the first time, with me first asking them to stand (state) and then sit (considete, quaeso).
Teacher : Salvete, discipuli.
Students : Salve, magister. Salvete, sodales.
5. a) The students then copied quid est nomen tibi? and mihi nomen est…. into their books, in large letters so that they could write the English beneath as shown in the images below. These come from Disco 2, which we didn’t look at, but could have.
b) Each student asked somebody their name, who replied. Then they swapped roles. Then we created a chain around the whole class, where one student asked another, who replied and asked another, who replied and asked another, and so on until we had made it right around. I told them that I would time it - it took 1 minute and 20 seconds.
6. I gave each student a copy of the Provincia play sheet and said that this was from a game that we would be playing soon, but that first they would need to learn some vocabulary in order to understand it. I asked them to hold onto the sheet, because it would be needed in the next few lessons. Provincia can be downloaded here. NEXT TIME: Next year I will link the meaning of provincia with the map in the LLSPI textbook - explain that places like Gallia and Hispania are ‘provinciae’.
7. I wrote up on the board the words we would need to learn, in order to play Provincia, with the plan being to tick them off as we learnt them. I encouraged them to read the words out as I wrote them up. The list went:
parvus magnus
insula silva fluvius oppidum
unus duo tres quattuor quinque
sex septem octo novem decem.
I asked them if they could identify the last ten words. Nearly every student rightly deduced that they were the numbers I to 10.
8. I asked if there were any students who enjoyed drawing cartoons and picked two volunteers. The first one was asked to draw a mouse. Next to the mouse I wrote “mus est parvus” and asked the students to copy the picture and caption into their books. The next volunteer was asked to draw an elephant, to which I added the caption “elephantus est magnus” and again asked the students to copy it down. Thirdly I wrote “parvus” and “magnus” with a double ended arrow between them, and said that this means that they are opposites. I then asked the students what the two words might mean. Every hand went up. I told them that if they thought they would forget the meanings of “parvus” and “magnus” that they could write it in English to remind them, but that the less English they had in their books the better. We ticked the two words off our list.
9. It was now my turn to draw. I put four boxes on the board and drew a forrest, island, river and town, inviting them to shout out what they thought they were as I went. I explained that each was one of the four words written on the board, and that if they thought they might know one, they should suggest a match and explain their reasoning. We heard that someone was “insulated” on an island, and a little about Sylvanian Families. The students drew each image, along with the word, into their own books. We ticked them off the list.
10. We finished the lesson with a quick game of Quid est? The students had seen that Quid est? meant “What is?” in “Quid est nomen tibi?” so they understood that when I pointed to my drawing of an island and said “Quid est?” why I wanted them to respond “Insula est.” I did this with the four images. We began with the entire class, before asking a student to volunteer to go it alone. After a while, the first volunteer asked for a second, and now they began asking the questions. The second student was enjoying answering with great speed, so we removed the captions and they did it purely from memory. After a while the students sat down, and the whole class did it once more, this time without the captions.
Homework: The class were asked to look over the map at the beginning of LLPSI, and to make some observations comparing the place names the Ancient Romans used, to the names used today. I told them that we would share our observations next lesson.
