Grammar in a Comprehensible Input Classroom

Grammar.  Grammar is what I loved about Latin when I learned it in college.  I still love grammar.  I love it when I teach it to my Language Arts classes (I get excited about participles--I mean, verbs can be so versatile) and I love it when I teach it to my Latin classes.  I honestly love the little nitpicky bits that can be pulled apart and analyzed, then put back together, sometimes with greater and deeper meanings explored.  My heart skips a beat just writing about it here.

But I have wrestled with the concept of teaching grammar for a decade now.

By my second year, I was dabbling in a comprehensible format for my classes.  I wanted all students to learn, not just the kids who have a natural knack for analyzing bits and putting them back together.  Those kids--kids like me--tend to have an easy time in school already, and the fact they could succeed in my class was really no great accomplishment on my part.  I wanted the regular kids to be able to learn and love Latin; more so I wanted the kids who struggle, whose talents tended to lie outside of sitting in rows quietly jotting down notes, to wear Latin like a badge of achievement.  Wow, you know Latin?  Isn't it hard?

However, Latin can be difficult in a comprehensible class.  Not impossible, and most definitely better comprehensibly than not, but the Latin language has a grammar that is distinctly foreign to a native English speaker.  It's inflected--the endings change based on what a word is doing in a sentence, and word order borders on a creative free-for-all.  While I can help my students learn vocabulary with ease, helping them to hear some of the more subtle grammar shifts sometimes can be difficult without moving into direct grammar instruction, which really only helps my logic-minded students who are already scholastically successful.

I have found a compromise for myself over the last couple of years: I have slowly been making and compiling grammar powerpoints that offer the concept completely in context and leave me to decide how much explicit instruction to include (depending on the program I'm part of at the time).  My drawings are goofy and my stories are generally macabre (so is my sense of humor), but the repetition of form is serious, and I usually pair them with circling (described in this blog post) and focusing on the new grammatical structure, all in Latin, with some English translation so they can see the connection.

Recently, I wanted to work on genitives.  I always offer the name of the grammatical structure on the ppt for those kids who just really want to know grammar.  I don't require my students to know the name, though, just to be able to function within the structure, and that's loosely defined by what I see them as capable of at the time.

Here's the ppt I put up:



I then initiated a series of circling for each slide that went as follows:

classis!  erat canis pueri! (aaaaah!)
erat canis pueri quod puer canem habebat! (aaaah!)
canis puerum habebat an puer canem habebat? (puer canem habebat)
puer canem habebat? (ita/certe)
canis puerum habebat? (minime)
ita, puer canem habebat!  itaque, erat canis pueri! (aaaaah!)
erat canis pueri an matris? (pueri)
erat canis draconis? (minime)

And I would circle each slide in this manner.  The big goal was to create the connection between "puer canem habebat" and "erat canis pueri" because both have the same basic meaning and can form that connection for the kids.  The ppt offered me a visual to point to with each step, and the idea of a girl being the daughter of a dragon was absurd enough to bring them back when they began to lose focus (after all, repetition is repetitive).  The next day, when they came into class, they found this worksheet on their desks.  Since it was all about re-establishing the connection that I was building the previous day, most of my students found it very easy.  To double-check their understanding of the genitive phrases (and to reinforce it for students who perhaps didn't quite get it the day before) I had the classes translate the genitive phrases together.  They actually asked that there be questions like this on the test--some asked that this be the entire test.  The questions aren't overly hard, but the important thing is that they require a student to understand the fundamental relationship between a word and any genitive connected to it.

And I think (I am always learning and experimenting, so I won't pretend to know) this is what I want out of grammar instruction in Latin.  Contextualized relationship-building.  Understanding how words and forms connect to each other.

After years of teaching using comprehensible input, I am slowly working my way toward grammar instruction that I like and that makes grammar comprehensible to all students.

(Oh, and in case you want to use them, I have all of my grammar powerpoints available here.  At least, the ones I have completed.  Some of them need work, or I had to make them quickly, so they are short or have mistakes.  I know that, and appreciate it if you send me a mistake so I can correct it!  After I've finished making all of them, I'll go back through and start making them nicer.)

How to Make an Ablative Absolute Quilt (From my article in the Classicist)

Today I woke up and (as happens all-too-often) realized that I really had no realistic plan for teaching my Latin II class. I was bored with the normal day-to-day activities that we all do as standby, and wanted to do something a little different.

As I stood looking around my room, willing my desks and chairs to give me an idea, that ever-elusive muse of teaching touched me and I knew what I was going to do with my students—we were going to make a quilt! A paper quilt, clare, because I don’t have the money for fabric or ... (you can read the rest here)

Activity for an Insomniac: Quick, Easy, and No Prep!

Last week I was facing my class after a night of almost no sleep.  Like many teachers, there are those times when my head gets filled with a huge list of responsibilities that have to be carried out in the next day or week.  This was one of those times; I woke and started working out how I was going to get everything done.  Unfortunately this was around 1 AM.  Which meant that when I finally got to school and had to teach around 6 hours later, I had little energy to offer my students.

Often on days where I'm sick or feeling wiped out (which are rare) I fall back on worksheets, which my class receives rarely enough that a worksheet elicits concern from my kids. 

This time, however, my son had just been sick the week before and I had given the substitute worksheets for my students to do while I was away.  I really had no interest in giving them worksheets again.  As the clock ticked closer to our late bell, I finally realized what I could do that would be low impact on me and enjoyable to my kids.

I assigned a comic.  They were required to form small groups (I arranged the desks in 4-person "tables" before class actually started) and write a comic in the passive voice (the grammar topic we've been working on).  Once I had all the comics turned in, I taped them around the hall, far enough away from each other that students wouldn't have to crowd each other to read them.

Lastly, because I wanted them to interact with each other's work, I gave each group seven squares of paper.  The papers were new comic panels, I explained,  for them to write and illustrate new endings for their classmates' comics.  Groups fanned out and eagerly read the other comics and discussed the best way to change each story.  There was a lot of discussion, a lot of laughter, and only a little need for a Latin teacher.   So I stood back and watched the movement and the relaxed Latin atmosphere.  

 I will break this activity out again sometime--it's a great rainy day activity with its natural kinesthetic aspect and light tone.  Yet students had to flex their Latin muscles too as well as solve the problem of writing an entire story in the passive voice (try it--it's hard).

If you've used similar activities in your classes, I would love to hear about it!  Post below.

Singing a Song for Memory's Sake

I think I need to start by apologizing.  I have let almost two months slip by without posting anything.  I am sorry.  Miriam and I started this blog because we hoped to share ideas and generate conversation about classroom practices.  That really cannot happen if I don't bother to post anything.

I have excuses; some of my excuses will likely actually become blog posts.

Generally, though, it's the beginning of the school year, when I spend most of my time trying to get my head on straight and my feet firmly planted.  I only started reading blogs regularly again about a week ago.

And now, a week later, a blog post.

One of my and my students' favorite activities so far this year has been a simple one that I have actually done before in class--without integrated technology.

I believe in using art to help students elicit better and truer connections between concepts, help them learn or memorize the many, many forms that Latin tends to ask out of them, and help them create their own relationship with the material we cover.  Sometimes I have them draw.  Last year I made them write a haiku (an activity I hope to develop more fully this year--I enjoyed the exercise and Latin, with its lack of emphasis on word order, is particularly well-suited to haiku).  And there is always music.

We sing in my class almost from day one.  A song for the present tense.  One for the noun forms.  I have songs on a CD I purchased, songs handed down to me by other Latin teachers, and even some that I have created myself.

All of that helps, and when students fill out surveys at the end of the year listing what worked and didn't work in my class, the songs are always listed as the most helpful aspect of class.  They are also often listed by some of those same students as the things that they disliked the most--but I can take the bad as long as I get the good.

About a month ago (sorry again!), my students were being asked to learn the forms of hic and ille, which are very irregular words.  I actually don't have a song in my pocket for those forms, so I couldn't offer them a quick recording they could put on repeat at home until they learned all the endings.  Instead, I chose to ask students to form small groups (this is Latin II, so they have all had my class before, we have a good rapport, and I don't need to either give them a seating chart or choose groups for them) and create songs that incorporated all of the different forms.  The rule was that the songs couldn't be too long and they had to be catchy.

Roaming around the room as students worked, I found some students singing various children's songs together while others were furiously thumbing through their music lists on their smart phones, playing bits of songs they thought might work as the rest of their groups listened and commented.  Each group had to repeatedly sing each form to test the forms with each new song.  Each group had to sing the forms several times to practice and get the song right.

Then came the recording.  This part of the activity needs some tweaking before I do it again, and it really just came to me as a whim when a student asked me "Will we be singing these for the whole class?"  She somehow managed to look both hopeful and worried, and I found my normal answer ("No"--because I don't like putting students on the spot when I don't have to--besides, even without incorporating a class performance, I was getting what I wanted out the activity: practice and repetition) somehow lacking.  Instead, before I knew it, the words "We'll be recording them" had slipped out and she left pleased.  I stood in place, wondering how I was going to pull it off.

Enter VoiceThread.  You have probably heard of it.  It's an online service that allows you to choose an image, set it up as a "voicethread" and then open it up for "comments," which can be recorded audio, typed, or drawn.  There are many ways to use this service, most of them much more creative than my simple public repository for student songs, and I promise a future blog post that highlights this free web tool.

The next day, when they were due to have their songs completed and ready to record, I showed my students how to make a voicethread and how to record their songs as a comment on an image of their choosing.  I logged them in to my own account, offered them a microphone, and let each group take a turn.  Most groups took a couple of tries to record their songs successfully (just think--more repetitions!).  I had the rest of the class working on a different activity while a group at a time recorded.

That evening, I quickly posted links to each voicethread on a blog I created solely for this kind of purpose, created a QR code (via Kaywa) that linked to the blog post, and posted the code outside my door.

The one thing I would do differently if I had it to do over (and I will--next year) is to have one voicethread for each class, or perhaps choose a different repository system altogether.  Not that VoiceThread isn't pretty, but it has its limits.  On a free account, for example, I can only create five of my own voicethreads (a problem when you have 10-12 groups recording).

My students really enjoyed this, took songwriting much more seriously when they realized they would be recording their songs, and got to repeat the forms of two difficult Latin words over and over, without it feeling rote.

What are some ways you incorporate songs--especially songwriting--into your own classes?

"Drawing" Connections

I am a huge fan of art.  I have drawn all my life--I can't remember a time when I didn't draw.  And I have always used art and drawing to help me connect to the world and to understand feelings and concepts that may not have been as clear otherwise.

Art is an effective tool.  Too often, art is pushed aside as unnecessary, a distraction from what is "really" important.  In the educational climate today, with a focus on "core curriculum"--a term that marginalizes other valid topics of instruction--many schools are shutting down art programs as well as other "electives".

But art is actually a great window into another aspect of brain function.  All too often in school we focus on using recall, memorization of facts, and don't tap into the creative side of the brain; whether or not you agree with Gardner's Multiple Intelligences, approaching information from multiple pathways builds more connections between neurons and simply makes it easier to remember.  When those pathways cross brain hemispheres, the connections are more varied and become stronger.

My students are tested with explicitly grammar-based questions.  I have been struggling with the best way to help them understand the grammar and still stay true to my wish that Latin instruction be about communication and using the language.  It's a difficult balance.  My upper levels especially have to deal with topics they never think about: the subjunctive mood, the passive voice, participles, etc., and they have a hard time wrapping their heads around the concepts in English--in Latin it becomes nearly impossible.

When I most recently lived in Oklahoma I taught in a small private school, and that school had adopted a program called A+ Schools.  This program champions the use of higher-order thinking and the arts, not only as separate subjects, but incorporated into the classroom as a means of deeper learning.  I experimented a small amount with art in my classes then, but really only started using it this year.

I was frustrated because my students had overall failed the previous test.  I was even losing sleep--which turned out to be the perfect situation to remember A+ and the idea of art infusion.  The next morning, I swept into the room carrying sheets of bulletin-board paper and gave the class their instructions: in groups of four, they had to "draw the subjunctive."  

Whenever a teacher asks anything that, well, weird, there are always protests and questions.  "How do we do that?" is the most common and obvious question.  And, since I really wanted them to internalize and think about the information and the ways in which it could be represented visually, I refused to answer that question.  In truth, there was no right answer.  If they wrote sentences and illustrated them, that would be fine.  If they created a flow chart, that would be fine.  Whatever path to visualization they found would please me, so I simply told them, "You get to figure that out--all I want is that it represent both the imperfect and the pluperfect subjunctive."  I knew that the completely new approach was uncomfortable for them--so I went around, reinforcing that I'm not looking at the quality of the artwork here (I love stick figures!), just the quality of the connection.

Unfortunately (perhaps tragically) I don't have any pictures of that first--and best, in my opinion--round of drawing grammar.  Since that first try, students are much more willing to draw abstract concepts, and several have approached me to let me know that it really helped them understand what we were learning.  It forces them to process information--even if, as in the most recent version of the activity, they were creating and drawing sentences more than interpreting grammatical concepts.

The success that my students expressed to me was reflected in their work.  After they had created their posters, students had no difficulties creating sentences using the subjunctive correctly.    

In addition, a couple of weeks ago, I created a "scavenger hunt" based on the posters my students had created.  The scavenger hunt really brought closure to the activity that I hadn't realized it was missing--so I will definitely be doing that again.  Since all of the posters are student-conceptualized and student-created, the scavenger hunt remained personalized and caused students to read each others' posters and interact more deeply with that information than they had beforehand.  As a bonus, students enjoyed the chance to have their work viewed by their friends.

Are there other activities that use art in this way?  I know I have taken this sort of large activity (that takes up almost an entire class period!) and minimized it into students writing and illustrating a sample sentence for a grammar topic (I did this last week as part of a learning station).  I have used other art forms (such as haiku--which is such a versatile poetic format!) that students must still use with the grammar, and asked them to create songs to reflect new grammar topics (which inspired me to create one myself).  What ways have you asked students to "draw" connections?

Eat Your Grammar

I'm not naturally a grammar person.  Check that--I am completely a grammar person, but I'm not naturally a grammar teacher.  On a personal level, I love grammar.  I love to take language apart into little tiny pieces, examine it, poke its innards a little, then put it back together like a Frankenstein project.  I love to make grammar jokes at my poor husband, who hates grammar and my jokes.

But I know that in each of my classes of 30 or so students, maybe two or three of them feel the same way I do (a high number, but I do teach Latin, and generally the more logically-inclined students are the ones who sign up).

So when I teach grammar, I try to find ways to make it easier to digest.

One method, which I'll publish here later on, is to do daily snippets of Latin I call "Daily Grammar Practice"--a method I completely stole from my year of teaching English and re-imagined to fit Latin.

Another thing I do, which I am sharing here in this post, is to help students draw connections between the grammar concept and something more concrete.  The rare 2nd declension noun that ends in "r" (like "puer" and "vir") is a ninja in my classroom ("he's sneaky and infiltrates the 2nd declension in secret").  Adjectives are stalkers--they want to be just like the nouns they describe (but are ultimately themselves--to avoid declension confusion).  And conjugations are like cookies.

I would love to take full credit for this idea, but it's honestly not my own.  A wonderful lady presented at Nationals about how she uses Oreo cookies to help students understand conjugations.  At the time I was completely anti-explicit-grammar, so I sort of went "that's neat" and filed the idea away but did nothing with it.

Fast forward many years and different experiences.  I find myself in a situation where I have to teach some grammar explicitly.  And last week I was facing the daunting task of teaching conjugations, which tends to make some students want to bang their heads on their desks (I know, because they do it).

Enter a food-based bribe.

I didn't tell them anything about what I was doing.  I just had them sit in pairs (I cannot afford to buy enough cookies for each of my 120 Latin I students, alas) with a paper towel and four cookies in front of them.  Each cookie was different--one was the classic Oreo, one was double-stuffed, one was mint, and one was chocolate.

Then I had them make observations: how were the cookies different from each other?  What was special about each one?

On the board I had drawn a picture of each type of Oreo and given an example of a verb in the correlating conjugation.*  From there, they picked out the dominant vowel for each conjugation and I helped them figure out the main features of the infinitive for each conjugation (conjugations, infinitives, sum, possum, volo, and nolo are all grammar features in this particular chapter).

The completed chart on the board looked like this:

Which is a lot of grammar to digest.  So that was it for grammar for the day.  We sang songs and made up some Latin stories together (generally via TPRS and what the TPRS gurus refer to as either PQA or mini-stories).

We didn't touch the grammar again until the next day.  I had the desks arranged in groups when they entered and they self-selected who they would be working with simply by sitting down.

This is where I added my own twist to the lesson.  Yeah, we connected conjugations to cookies, something concrete, but it's still a little forgettable.  I really wanted students to synthesize the information and make it their own.

So I had them make posters.  I actually do something similar to this quite often with abstract concepts.  I told students each group had to make a poster that answered the age-old question, "How is a Conjugation like a Cookie?"  After fielding the normal range of questions, like "How do we draw that?" ("That's the fun part--you get to figure it out!"), "Can we use other types of cookies?" ("Yes"), "Can we come up with our own concept?" ("Yes, but let's keep it food-based, just for simplicity."), I told the kids to go at, and the biggest rule was that I didn't want to see my chart from the day before repeated.

My goal was for them to find their own connections between the conjugations and a symbol that they have chosen.

Some groups stuck with the Oreo theme, but recreated the concept in their own words with their own connection.

Most groups came up with their own cookie examples: sugar, chocolate-chip, oatmeal-raisin, etc.  Some groups wanted to really move outside of cookies and find their own concept.  I have a pasta poster, a sandwich poster, a pocky poster, and a bread poster.  Most importantly, though, they took the concept and made it concrete for themselves.

*For Latin teachers interested in doing the same activity, the Oreos break down as follows:

• The Original Oreo: the original Oreo is the regular oreo.  It is standard.  It follows the rules.  Much like the first  conjugation , you know what to expect and what you are going to get when you get the original Oreo.  That and "a" is the first letter of the alphabet--another connection to make.
• The Double-Stuff Oreo: double the stuffing represents double the "e" or, better, "ē".  The extra room is for the long vowel.  The "e" is everywhere, too--even in first person singular.
• The Mint Oreo: the mint is different, unexpected, out of the ordinary recipe of chocolate and vanilla.  The third  conjugation is also different.  It is a little 2nd conjugation, a little 4th conjugation, and hard to pinpoint.  Another Oreo that would work for this conjugation is the one that has chocolate and vanilla cookies sandwiched with the creme.
• The Chocolate Oreo: the cookies are chocolate.  The cream is chocolate.  The whole cookie is chocolate all the way through.  Just like the "i" in the 4th conjugation.  It's in every form.

My students felt left out because I wouldn't take actual pictures
 of them, so this was my compromise.