projects

Io Saturnalia – Tips for Holiday Projects

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It’s that time of year again – the crops are in, the days are growing short, and the winter solstice is approaching. Red hats and epigram-laden gifts are everywhere; priests are unfettering Saturn’s wooly bands, and everyone is thinking of past ages more golden. This year there seems to be a trend sweeping classroom doors across America (just look at Pinterest!) and so we come to the subject of my blog article today – ad ostia ornanda.
A door is not much different than a bulletin board, really, but your audience is wider. You can reach not only your own students but anyone who passes by. Our school did a contest this year between teachers, and the result was a school full of interesting and amazing design work and creativity as teachers and students cooperated and competed. It’s certainly a great way to build community, and you could always suggest a small competition in your own department if you don’t think the whole school will go for it. It’s also a great chance to sell, if even in a small way, Latin’s unique draw as a language to students who might not know how amazing it is.
How did I do my door? I followed these simple steps. First, I assigned two classes with responsibilities over the door. One, my senior Latin 5, was responsible for the basic design. The first idea, Saturn dressed as Santa eating elves was perhaps sadly but rightfully rejected, and instead they decided on a holiday theme that incorporated Latinate elements: a Janus on top of the tree; a holiday abies whose trunk was covered in Greek decorative designs; a scroll volute with Io Saturnalia written upon it. The other, Latin 4, made ornaments with their favorite or at least apt Latin phrases and then “hung” them on the tree with glue and tape. Most of the more complicated pieces (the Janus, the scroll volute) were made easily by projecting an image on my whiteboard, adjusting its size, and then putting a piece of colored paper on the whiteboard held up by magnets for easy tracing. Everything took about two class periods of work, so it’s not a big imposition on your class time and you’ll be earning dividends in classroom community building.
If you aren’t interested, or aren’t allowed, religious themes pagan or otherwise, try doing a winter theme ala Horace Odes 1.9. Imagine a majestic mountain covered in snow, its trees burdened by heavy snow and a river glittering with ice. Above the gods battle using storms. Move to the foreground where you see a cozy house and, inside the window, a man and woman sitting by the fire with a glass of wine in their hands. If you like, throw in some Latin from the poem, making sure to show the word picture imagery of alta…nive…Soracte and gelu…flumen…acuto.
Why not make a whole winter unit, while you’re at it? Ovid’s Tristia 3.10 has some great brumic diction describing the horrors of Tomis (e.g. lines 21-22: saepe sonant moti glacie pendent capilli, et nitet inducto candida barba gelu). Or study the constellations that appear in the winter. Manilius’ Astromicon is too hard for most high schoolers, but it’s got some great imagery and info about what kinds of associations the Romans had with the winter months. Hey, that’s another idea for a decorated door…

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Latin: Bringing People Together Since 753 B.C. 1

This entry was posted in Feature Posts and tagged Finnish Radio Latin projects Teaching on by

Today CANEns is pleased to have a guest article from Bethanie Sawyer, a Latin teacher at Longmeadow High School in Longmeadow, MA, in which she discusses how she uses Finnish Radio Latin News in her classes.
I admit I have missed the boat on using oral Latin in the classroom. I like the idea, I’ve learned a lot of great ways to incorporate it, but in recent years I find that I just… forget. So now with a new teacher evaluation system, student learning goals, and technology goals, I am finally forcing myself to include Latin as a spoken language in my curriculum.
Putting it that way makes it sound like a miserable chore, however. On the contrary, part of my plan in making student learning and technology goals that included oral Latin was an excuse to have my students listen to Nuntii Latini – or, as I like to call it – the Finnish Radio Latin News.
If you are unfamiliar with this, Nuntii Latini is a four to five minute news program entirely in Latin broadcast every Friday on the Finnish radio – it was started in 1989 but has been made available in recent years on the internet. Usually consisting of four to six short reports, Nuntii Latini covers stories from the election of the new pope to the situation in Syria to Berlusconi’s tax fraud to the best way to keep tulips blooming in a vase. The transcripts of the report are available and the audio can be downloaded or streamed from the website.
Nuntii Latini is a treat for my students – they love it. Our classes have a scheduled half-block (about 25 minutes) in the language lab every week, so with the upper levels, we have been alternating a day of practicing our reading of dactylic hexameter with listening to the Latin news. Latin is often overlooked when it comes to language labs – again, my students are not at a level of Latin composition or conversation – but we can go to the lab, listen to the news, read the text, and I can send them vocabulary and questions, which they then can work through with randomly assigned partners and answer in a document that I then collect – without any of us touching a piece of paper. (Technology goals, eat your heart out.) But a lab is not necessary – all you need is some reliable internet and a set of speakers.
But Magistra (you – or, rather, other people not language teachers – may ask), the text of the audio is right there on the website! Why not just read it? What do you gain from listening to it as well? This, o comites, is what I love best about Nuntii Latini. It reminds us all that Latin is a language – still a living one. Just because there are no native speakers of Latin alive to discuss current events doesn’t mean that people cannot use the language to report it.
The news stories are not America-focused, and for many students, the Latin news is the first (or only) place they will have heard of the events. There is no English on the page (aside from links to articles about the site in English-speaking journals); the instructions for how to stream or download the audio is in Latin – or Finnish. Unlike most of the Latin texts we read, it is not anywhere translated on the internet.
Students hear (and see) their vocab words from Ovid mixed in with ‘new’ Latin words like microparticulae (microchips) and telephoniculae (cell phones). No, they’re not practicing speaking Latin, and they certainly would have a lot of difficulty with comprehension if the text were not available to read, as well, but I still find that Nuntii Latini is a great resource and activity. One of the aspects of teaching Latin that I like best of all is the opportunity to share with students perspectives of a culture other than their own, that still has a connection to their own. We do this by learning of ancient Mediterranean societies, of course, but the Latin news allows us to see what other countries currently may be thinking about, and experiencing, and finding most important. I think that is so valuable to education in general, and specifically to a language course. The fact that we are able to get these perspectives because of Latin being a living, active language that students can hear and understand – well, I can’t think of anything better.