Looking for inspiration on how to engage your students in reading Latin? Here are 28 activities to pique student interest, build confidence, and consolidate learning.
Pre-Reading
There are many ways you can get your learners engaged in a Latin story before you even begin reading.
1. Looking through the text is a technique where learners read the title, glossed words, and identify vocabulary they know. They can then predict what the story is about.
2. A simplified version is when students skim the story for its basic sense or meaning.
3. Watching a video dramatization of the story provides the learner with visual clues as to the characters and their actions, sets the scene, and helps them grasp the gist of a story.
Reading
As the learners read model sentences or stories for the first time, they begin to interact with the syntactical patterns and vocabulary, while getting immersed in the storyline.
4. Echo reading is when learners repeat what the teacher has just read. You can use this as part of the first reading of model sentences or a story.
5. For choral reading, learners read the passage together as a class, helping them to be less self-conscious about making mistakes. This technique can be used to become more familiar with a reading.
6. Reading in pairs is when two students read the Latin to each other. This allows for a chance to practice reading out loud and listening to the Latin passage.
7. During silent reading, the learner reads to themselves in class.
8. Popcorn reading is used for variety – rather than the teacher choosing the reader, each reader picks the next student to read.
Comprehension
Comprehension activities are widely used to assist and test understanding, and pave the way for the later approach to Latin literature.
9. Asking questions orally or written in either Latin or English should be carefully designed to elicit correct, concrete answers from the learner and build their confidence.
10. Acting out the story is a fun way to get students up on their feet, and works best with dialogue or an action story.
Picturing
For many learners, demonstrating comprehension comes easier when using images and other forms of expression. These techniques encourage learners to use their wider skill set.
11. Draw the story helps learners engage with the content in a different way. Either the teacher or learner illustrates the sentence in the form of a picture to demonstrate and aid comprehension.
12. After reading a paragraph or a story, learners can write out film directions as to how a scene could be filmed. This helps learners focus on verb tenses, and think about which characters are present and where they are in the scene.
13. To create a story board, students draw sketches of scenes depicting key sentences selected either by the teacher or learner to narrate a story.
14. Caption this is the opposite of storyboarding, and asks the learner to label a series of drawings that depict the story.
Translating
Translating a passage from Latin to English is a technique that can be used as a testing device, but is most effective in small amounts and in a controlled environment.
15. A cloze exercise provides the learner with a written passage that has missing English words that translate a Latin word or phrase. This can be used to speed up the reading of a passage or as re-read activity.
16. Speed translating is a useful technique to move quickly through a story and not omit the plot line. The teacher translates the whole story, keeping the learners involved by giving them the occasional word or phrase to translate.
17. Jigsaw translating is a group activity to help the learner read a longer story more quickly. Assign learners to a group to read/translate a section of Latin. Then re-configure the groups so all sections of the passage are represented. Each person in the new groups reads/translates their section in the chronological order of the passage.
18. Translating as a class allows the learner to benefit from the collective mind and gives each student the responsibility of translating a sentence or two.
Rereading
The goal of rereading a story is to strengthen and maintain the learner’s grasp of story, language, and cultural context, and to develop confidence and fluency. Rereading should be as varied as possible to consolidate learning and sustain interest.
19. Asking learners to predict what happens next? is a good way to help them consolidate what they already know, not only about the current stories but also the overall storyline and characters. You can also ask your learners to use earlier Latin sentences and story points to justify the prediction.
20. Character analysis is when the learner creates a character map, rap sheet, or social media profile using Latin words and phrases to describe a character’s personality and actions. It can also be the basis for activities where learners take on a character’s point of view and role play to explain their actions.
21. With cut up and reassemble, learners reorder a set of jumbled sentences to reflect the story’s narrative.
22. Reread the story revisits the now-familiar story to help consolidate knowledge. It includes listening to the story while reading along, reading silently, miming actions at appropriate times, or watching or performing a dramatization.
Culture/Literature
Students learning Latin are immersed in the language and culture of the Roman empire, which provides many learning opportunities in the context of the stories. The Cambridge Latin Course stories are infused with cultural context, and additional ‘culture’ sections at the end of each stage expand and enhance cultural themes.
23. Ask the learners to find examples of X, e.g. foods the Romans ate, the kinds of entertainment they enjoyed, what kind of government they had, what their daily routine was.
24. What did we learn about Roman culture? is one of the essential questions for Latin learners when they read or look at illustrations. It helps them build for themselves, by observation and deduction, a richer portrait of the Roman world.
25. Class discussion of the cultural features is an opportunity for learners to hear a different viewpoint, enabling them to develop judgements based on a wider understanding.
Language
After the learner has read the story multiple times, these techniques are used to reinforce their understanding of older language points or strengthen new ones. These strategies ask the learner to look more closely at the morphology and syntax used.
26. How is language used? This question asks the student to note the way the tenses, sentence patterns etc. affect the story.
27. Find examples of X is when the learner looks through the story again to find a specific language point (e.g. the dative case, prep phrases) or to note the number of times a tense or case is used. Save this activity until the learners are familiar with both the story and the language point.
28. Asking the learner to recognize sentence patterns helps them build familiarity and develop their Latin language skill set.
Click here for a downloadable handout of these strategies!
