I began by returning the worksheets from yesterday. I explained that their were three or four students who didn’t do as well as the others. I explained that this was not a worry at all - that we would be doing basically the same thing again today, and then again it in the test of Friday. If they still didn't understand it then, it would be obvious in the test - and then we could sit down and talk about it. However, if they wanted to discuss it before then, they could come to the staffroom or ask during the lesson.
2. I reminded them that I would be collecting their books after the test on Friday, and that they should ensure that they have written their piece on what they have done/learnt in Latin so far, and ensure that all their sheets were glued into their books.
3. With “administration” out of the way, we began with our formal class greeting.
4. I projected the images of the 12 Olympians onto the screen. I asked the students what they knew about these gods, and just let them talk - one at a time - until the last hand went down. You can access these images here.
5. I explained that there were both Greek and Roman versions of each god, and that we would be referring to Greek gods and Roman gods. (The purpose of this activity was not to teach the words ‘dea’ and ‘deus’ but ‘Graecus and Romanus’). I said that Zeus was a Greek god and Iuppiter, for example, was a Roman god. We then added to our ‘singularis’ and ‘pluralis’ table from yesterday. Note: In my haste to write up the headings, I accidentally wrote ‘sigularis’. I was pleased when one of the students pointed out my error.
6. I asked for a volunteer to help me explain what we would now be doing. I would go down the role and every single student was going to speak one sentence of Latin about the gods. For example, if I said ‘Ζεύς’ the student would respond ‘Ζεύς est deus Graecus’. If I said ‘Iuppiter et Volcanus’ the student would respond ‘Iuppiter et Volcanus sunt dei Romani’. If the student made an error, I was able to correct it in real time. Once the sentence was correctly formed, the entire class repeated it. After each five students, I changed to the next slide.
As i said, I went down the roll and asked each student for one sentence. I used this as an opportunity to reinforce ‘ubi est…?’. Instead of just calling out a name, I looked around the room and asked ‘ubi est Claudia?’. They began to respond ‘adsum’, which is the response we use when taking the roll.
7. I asked the students if they had had any experience translating something from one language to another. About a third of the class said that they had. I told them that we would be doing our first piece of translation today, and I wanted them to work in three steps.
i) read the sentence in Latin
ii) ensure that they knew what the sentence meant
iii) Write the sentence in English, keeping the meaning as close as possible to the original, but making sure that what they wrote was a good English sentence
The students now translated lines 38 to 48 of LLPSI Capitulum Primum. Note: I noticed that some were having trouble differentiating “Sparta est oppidum Graecum” with “Sparta est oppidum in Gracia”. I found that the easiest way around this was to say that only the word “in” should be translated as “in”, otherwise the words meant Greek and Roman, like our 12 Olympians. This seemed to clear thing up. (We have the test next lesson, but during the following lessons we will go through their translations).
8. While the students were translating, I wrote ‘num elephantus est parvus?’ on the board, with ‘num’ underlined. One of the students asked what ‘num’ meant. I said that this was a word we could add to the beginning of a sentence, if we thought the answer should by ‘minime’. I then asked them all ‘num elephantus est parvus?’ sounding as incredulous as possible. They all responded ‘minime!!!’, to which I added “Ridiculum est!”.
