Monthly Archives: November 2012


Review Game "Battleship!"

So, if you’re like me, you’re always looking for fun ways to review material, especially grammar. My students LOVE to play Battleship. This works especially well for verbs and prepositions, but can be adapted for anything.
First, you make a board that looks something like this:
(6 rows, 8 columns, paper in landscape layout)
With | Through | Away From | To, Towards | In, On | Into, Onto | Without | After
Field
____________
Country house
_____________
Trees
_____________
Sticks
____________
Gardens
_____________
Forests
This one is obviously set up for prepositions, but, like I said, you can change it to work for verbs too. (Pronouns for the rows, verbs for the columns…you can even change tenses and voices! This is particularly awesome for actives and passives.)
The rules look like this:
Certamen Navale
(Battleship, in Latin!)
Directions:
1) Set up your ships. No diagonal or overlapping ships!! Check them off as you draw them:
___ Ship 1 takes up 5 squares
___ Ship 2 takes up 4 squares
___ Ship 3 takes up 4 squares
___ Ship 4 takes up 3 squares
___ Ship 5 takes up 3 squares
___ Ship 6 takes up 2 squares
2) Take turns asking for the location of the ships. Ask by saying the (person/preposition) (I, you, etc…) and the correct form of the (verb/noun) (Example: Ego Portabar would hit “I was being carried” and “In villam” would hit “into/onto the house”)
3) If you have a ship parked in that spot, say “hit.”
4) If you do not have a ship parked there OR your partner is incorrect say “miss.”
5) Don’t forget to track where your partner’s ships are!
And don’t forget: “Demersisti meam navem longam!” = “You sunk my battleship!”
What review games do you like to play?


Links for the Week of 11 November

In time for Movember, a piece about beards and mustaches in antiquity: http://hehasawifeyouknow.tumblr.com/post/34927465794/taking-it-on-the-chin-facial-hair-and-barbers-in (via @ancientblogger and @rogueclassicist)
And a piece about caryatids’ hairstyles: @http://www.greenwichcitizen.com/opinion/article/Grecian-formula-Archeologist-unravels-the-4016869.php (via @rogueclassicist)
An interesting MIT course about ancient technology and science: @http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/special-programs/sp-713-recreate-experiments-from-history-inform-the-future-from-the-past-galileo-january-iap-2010/ (via @dancohen)
An article in Scientific American on the Antikythera mechanism: @http://historyoftheancientworld.com/2012/11/decoding-an-ancient-computer/ (via @rogueclassicist)
A pice on ancient voting: http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/voting-with-the-ancient-greeks/ (via @KatyReddick)
The Etruscans: http://romanarcheo.blogspot.com/2012/10/what-have-etruscans-ever-done-for-us.html (via @jntribolo)
A piece about research in the time of Google: http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/11/why-googling-it-is-not-enough/#more-24869 (via @anniemurphypaul)
A new Latin app is available from Paul Hudson (Teachers can e-mail help@romansgohome.com for a free copy): https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/latin-builder/id576023631?ls=1&mt=8 (via @twostraws)


Thursday Resource: Digital Augustan Rome

DigitalAugustanRome
The Digital Augustan Rome website has a map of, as one would expect, Augustan Rome. What makes this incredibly useful, though, is that, once you’ve clicked on a site, there is a detailed discussion of the building or area with careful citations and explanations. This would be really useful for helping students get a sense of the layout of the city and why we believe each building was in each location.