TPRS to Eutropius. My GENIUS hour experiment.

I decided I wanted to have a Genius Hour project too. My Genius Hour project is to follow my passions, both in and out of the classroom. To follow are my reflections and musings of life inside and outside of the classroom. 

It's Sunday night, and I am sitting down to plan for next week... and I have this crazy idea. I've mentioned it before, but the more and more I think about it, as I become more inspired by the observations I have had of my students' learning under the TRPS model, I wonder if TPRS can be used as a way to present and help students master structures so they can begin to read authentic Latin from the first year?

The purpose of Latin, unlike many other languages, is not really to go to a country and speak the language (although, the ATM in the Vatican does have a Latin option...). The purpose is to be able to read the wisdom of the Romans, appreciate it, and apply those lessons to our world today, because they are still relevant.

One of the main problems I have discovered is, however, we do not teach students to READ Latin, we teach them to decode Latin. And most of the time, the decoding comes at the expense of finding real meaning in a text. Also, translation then becomes a slow and painful process. And not all of them understand quite how to do it. It's just unpleasant.

We finished building our first story last week, about zombies, and some other stuff. But mostly zombies. It went well. Like, really, awesomely, well. The kids learned about commands, Indirect Objects, Inflection, all these really cool things... AND I DIDNT WRITE DOWN ONE CHART. Epic. Win.

So this week, I took a look at my end game. The paragraph that I am building to:

[1] Romanum imperium a Romulo exordium habet, qui Reae Silviae, Vestalis virginis, filius et, quantum putatus est, Martis cum Remo fratre uno partu editus est. Is eum inter pastores latrocinaretur, decem et octo annos natus urbem exiguam in Palatino monte constituit XI Kal. Maias, Olympiadis sextae anno tertio, post Troiae excidium, ut qui plurimum minimumque tradunt, anno trecentesimo nonagesimo quarto.

Yes indeed. This is Eutropius. And its unadapted, except that I took out the one clause that will never make sense to a first year Latin student. 

So then I sat, and pondered. Where to begin? 

The first thing I did was identify basic grammatical structures that they would NOT have to know. This seems odd, but I wanted to narrow down the things that I would want them to know right away, vs the things that I could give them: 

Dates

Perfect Passive

Passive

natus + Acc extent

uno partu

Now for the things I want them to KNOW KNOW:  

S+V+DO+PP

sometimes you have to add a prep

Genitive

Family words

Looking at it this way is much more manageable. Less OMG-how-do-I-do-this-without-trying-to-find-the-verb-and-stuff, and more hey-all-I-have-to-do-is-work-on-structures-like-this-with-family-words-and-that's-easy.

WE CAN DO THIS! LIKE, FOR REAL! It's a little more strategic, to be sure, but it can work.

So, we're going to build a couple of stories around these concepts. I'll post my initial questions and the stories, and some examples of how I've circled through the statements at the end of the week, along with a wrap up. 

Game on.