Monday, November 25, 2013

Some Things Old, Something New — Day 6

Three girls were missing today because they were part of the One-Act Play team. And tomorrow, I'm gone. And Wednesday is just weird. And then it is a four-day weekend for Thanksgiving. Hmm... Let's consolidate our gains.

For the first time in a long time we did not sit on the floor and throw the ball around. We have done a good job of taking in new knowledge, especially with our ears, and we are doing a good job of integrating that in a pretty intuitive way with our minds. Taking some hints from the Rosetta Stone series, I felt that now that we have stretched our minds and forced ourselves to kind of figure some things out that tool us by surprise, we needed to integrate that with some other kinds of thinking. Rosetta Stone, being a computer program rather than human teacher, gives you lots of different images connected to very basic sentences or even mere words, to build up an intuitive sense of what this word means. We have done that with the sound, /dɪ'ʃiːpuːlɑː/, now we need to do it for the letters d-i-s-c-i-p-u-l-a. We've got great mental images of us claiming and declaring aloud who we are and what "he is"; now let's get a broader association. 

I made a super simple worksheet: big 16-point font (Palatino, of course), in two columns. On there for them to see written out for the first time were their instructions to begin the class: Surgite! Petitiones? (a questionable use, but I needed a cognate), and Oremus. Next came sic, non, and bene. The other side had Sum ________, Quis es?, and Quis est? Then the ladies got the following: Femina sum. Vir es. Femina est. And the gents' read: Vir sum. Femina es. Femina est. 

What I wanted them to do was to brainstorm and draw their own pictures (Pingite picturas!) of how they would represent these basic statements we have been making. I think it is important that they choose and create the picture that contains the meaning for them. What will stick in their minds? 

I was going to force them to only do this on their own, and not allow them to share ideas or see what the others created, but that would ignore the fact that some people just have better ideas which other people can still connect with. For example: the idea to use the Internet meme "Grumpy Cat" for the word non  was absolutely inspired. 

Here's what I made on the SMARTBoard (horrible trying to draw with SMART Ink on a Word doc!) which was kind of a best of/"easy does it" collection. 


Again, don't judge my stick-figure skills by the relative unprettiness of my "Femina est girl" who nevertheless has the boys all wound up. We could not settle on an overall best way to depict "Who is he?", and we had lots of ideas of how to show our class instructions so I just picked one. Tomorrow I think we will get in groups and try to draw some declarative sentences. Iordana, quis est Kæsa? should be fun to represent, as should Patricus non discipula est; est discipulus. Till then, try to draw your own stick-people pointing at themselves and others. 



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