I have to admit I was rather nervous this afternoon before the first Kids' Latin class of the Ancient Languages in the Park project. While I have ample experience teaching Latin to ages 9+, I've only ever done a few classes with early years - and then with only a few pupils, so classroom management was straightforward. With that lack of experience, why did I attempt this now? Well, I quite like a challenge, and the younger the age group, the more you need to condense information to the essential. To me, that's an exciting challenge in itself.
And so we started: ten rather wary-looking 4-9 year olds, two student assistants (thank you to Josh Somerville-Jacklin and Sally Hopkins), and myself... I had prepared meticulously, based on KS1 requirements, and had laminated just about everything I could think of. You can find the lesson plan I had prepared elsewhere on this website. But this is what actually happened...
1) Context: they quite liked this, as a warm-up exercise. We discussed images of architecture and clothing through the ages, put them in the right chronological order, and then matched the clothing with the buildings. Most of them were familiar with the Egyptians and the Middle Ages, though the prehistory was entirely alien - they placed it correctly because they thought the buildings and people looked 'a bit dirty!'. They had no idea about the difference between the Romans and Greeks but I decided to gloss this over...
2) I had then prepared a craft exercise making crowns with our Roman names on them - but they seemed a bit restless so I decided to do an active game instead. You can see a picture of the parachute game above, and I dare say they would have been perfectly contented had we played this all afternoon! It proved to be an excellent way for them to learn the entire greeting: 'Salve! Sum (insert name). Quis es?' 'Sum (insert other name)'. They quickly grasped the difference between boys' and girls' names, and we must have played with this for at least twenty minutes. Children from opposite sides had to run under the parachute, greeting each other in the middle and trying not to get squished when the thing came down. Of course myself and my assistants made sure we *did* get squished which caused much hilarity.
3) We then did a follow-up exercise based on 'what's the time, mister Wolf?'. I first played the wolf (I explained the word 'lupus'). The children stood in a line, asked 'Quis es?' and i kept on answering with Latin words of the first two declensions. But of course finally I shouted 'lupus' and then ran after them. We played this another two times with boys taking the role of the wolf. They came up with names of superheroes and of other figures from modern culture, but as long as they said 'sum...' in front of it, that was perfectly fine.
4) After this, they had finally relaxed a little, and we then did the matching game of Latin words and English derivatives. I let them do these first and then added the meaning of the Latin words based on what they had found out. They flew through these and so I thought they'd really like the Romulus and Remus story. I had added this because last year's group had wanted to do ONLY storytelling, over and over again... Not so this year's group! A number of the children weren't able to read in English (they were trilingual and were able to read in other languages). We did read through the whole thing but some of the children lost interest. So I immediately went on to the next exercise and let them devise their own stories, in two groups, using the Latin words they had learned. That was much more to their liking, as they were able to make the stories as gruesome or lovely as possible. There was a lot of killing of husbands and wolves...
5) As we had 10 minutes left at the end, we finally got round to making the crowns with Latinised names on them. The children took this very seriously and the class went 15 minutes over time because of it. However, this gave parents a chance to see what their children had been doing, and it was nice to see them so engrossed in the activity.
I had an amazing time with the children, and learned a lot: with such a diverse group, for example, it'll be better to focus on very basic literacy (words and phrases rather than sentences), even in English. This group is clearly not into reading but rather into creating of stories, so I will develop that too for the next classes. And I think I can also hugely increase the amount of time we play actual games: repetition is key, and by building new elements into the same game gradually, they learn a huge amount of material very quickly.
All of them insisted on taking the homework I set them, so I think that's a good sign.
Next Saturday: numerals, and - unless I change my mind by then - some Roman pottery...
Written by Evelien Bracke, Project Coordinator, 14 June 2014
And so we started: ten rather wary-looking 4-9 year olds, two student assistants (thank you to Josh Somerville-Jacklin and Sally Hopkins), and myself... I had prepared meticulously, based on KS1 requirements, and had laminated just about everything I could think of. You can find the lesson plan I had prepared elsewhere on this website. But this is what actually happened...
1) Context: they quite liked this, as a warm-up exercise. We discussed images of architecture and clothing through the ages, put them in the right chronological order, and then matched the clothing with the buildings. Most of them were familiar with the Egyptians and the Middle Ages, though the prehistory was entirely alien - they placed it correctly because they thought the buildings and people looked 'a bit dirty!'. They had no idea about the difference between the Romans and Greeks but I decided to gloss this over...
2) I had then prepared a craft exercise making crowns with our Roman names on them - but they seemed a bit restless so I decided to do an active game instead. You can see a picture of the parachute game above, and I dare say they would have been perfectly contented had we played this all afternoon! It proved to be an excellent way for them to learn the entire greeting: 'Salve! Sum (insert name). Quis es?' 'Sum (insert other name)'. They quickly grasped the difference between boys' and girls' names, and we must have played with this for at least twenty minutes. Children from opposite sides had to run under the parachute, greeting each other in the middle and trying not to get squished when the thing came down. Of course myself and my assistants made sure we *did* get squished which caused much hilarity.
3) We then did a follow-up exercise based on 'what's the time, mister Wolf?'. I first played the wolf (I explained the word 'lupus'). The children stood in a line, asked 'Quis es?' and i kept on answering with Latin words of the first two declensions. But of course finally I shouted 'lupus' and then ran after them. We played this another two times with boys taking the role of the wolf. They came up with names of superheroes and of other figures from modern culture, but as long as they said 'sum...' in front of it, that was perfectly fine.
4) After this, they had finally relaxed a little, and we then did the matching game of Latin words and English derivatives. I let them do these first and then added the meaning of the Latin words based on what they had found out. They flew through these and so I thought they'd really like the Romulus and Remus story. I had added this because last year's group had wanted to do ONLY storytelling, over and over again... Not so this year's group! A number of the children weren't able to read in English (they were trilingual and were able to read in other languages). We did read through the whole thing but some of the children lost interest. So I immediately went on to the next exercise and let them devise their own stories, in two groups, using the Latin words they had learned. That was much more to their liking, as they were able to make the stories as gruesome or lovely as possible. There was a lot of killing of husbands and wolves...
5) As we had 10 minutes left at the end, we finally got round to making the crowns with Latinised names on them. The children took this very seriously and the class went 15 minutes over time because of it. However, this gave parents a chance to see what their children had been doing, and it was nice to see them so engrossed in the activity.
I had an amazing time with the children, and learned a lot: with such a diverse group, for example, it'll be better to focus on very basic literacy (words and phrases rather than sentences), even in English. This group is clearly not into reading but rather into creating of stories, so I will develop that too for the next classes. And I think I can also hugely increase the amount of time we play actual games: repetition is key, and by building new elements into the same game gradually, they learn a huge amount of material very quickly.
All of them insisted on taking the homework I set them, so I think that's a good sign.
Next Saturday: numerals, and - unless I change my mind by then - some Roman pottery...
Written by Evelien Bracke, Project Coordinator, 14 June 2014