Recently, I was shopping at Target, when my eyes fell upon a 5-pack of multi-colored Erasable Highlighters!
I had been mulling over how I could teach my Latin students to train their eyes and figure out where to start in a sentence and where to go next. Boom! Here was my answer.
My Latin classes and I spent the next week with the highlighters, working with different ways to group, chunk, and color words in sentences to make translating them easier. We came up with tons of ideas, but these four seemed to be the favourites:
1: Code words that go together. Adjective-noun pairs, ablative absolutes, etc…
2: Code elisions in scansion (a favourite of my AP students!)
3: Code the masculine words one color, feminine words another color, neuter words a third color, main verbs a fourth color, etc…
4: Spectrum order = translation order (more or less): Subjects are PINK, Main Verbs are Orange, Direct Objects are Yellow, Clause Keywords are Green, Clause Verbs are Blue. (or something like that.) If you have Purple, you can tag Prepositional Phrases with that.
My students LOVE the Erasable Highlighters. If they mess up, they just erase it, and re-color it. Eventually, I plan to transition them off of the Erasable ones, to just regular ones, so that they really need to have their grammar solid. And after that, the highlighters start going away, and only their trained eyes remain.
This has seemed to work VERY well with my high schoolers. They really like the idea of being able to visualize a sentence and see it as a dynamic unit rather than as words on a page. The colors help solidify those visuals for the students. The key, I tell them, is to do what works for them. We don’t all have to be doing the same thing, but if they use the colors for the areas where they have trouble, they will train their brains to translate with the correct order and correct words together.
