Classroom Posters! 1
Like many teachers, I am always looking for ways to make my classroom look nice and educational at the same time. I have always loved the posters that French and Spanish teachers have with weather, days of the week, numbers, etc… on them. But these are hard to find for Latin.
Therefore, last summer, a few of my friends and I undertook a project to make such posters for our Latin classrooms. (We split up the work, of course! There were SO many posters!)
The aim in making the posters was to provide visual cues, rather than definitions. So we did things like: Dies Lunae with the moon on it, or Pluit with a picture of someone standing outside in the rain and carrying an umbrella. We even did a color wheel, with crayons for the various colors.
Anyway, so how does one use these? I work with them from the first day of class. We go around the room and talk through the posters and the students understand what they are and where to look if they need a reminder of what a word or phrase means.
These are TERRIFIC when you are working to get your students composing, writing, speaking. The visual cues give them another association with the word besides the definition or just another word on a flashcard. Our students love them—hope yours will too!
If you want to do these posters too, they are actually really easy to make. (If you click the pictures, you can see what we did with the posters!) We used Apple’s Pages, but Photoshop works too—or really, any image manipulation program. We made the following posters: (unless otherwise specified, they are 8.5” x 11”, individual posters)
Days of the week
Months of the year
Alphabet posters
Numeral posters (I-X and then counting by 10s up)
Clothing posters (Modern and Ancient—using a dressed person and pointing to various articles of clothing)
Weather posters
Season posters
Prepositions with the Accusative (2 pages)
Prepositions with the Ablative
Color wheel (11×17)
Useful phrases (non intellego, etc…)
How to write a Roman Letter
Ways to say yes
Ways to say no
May I go to the bathroom?
Commonly confused Q words
A few fun ones: Harrius Potter, Twilight (Crepusculum), Hunger Games (Ludi Famis), Doctor Who (Medicus Quis), That’s What She Said (Est quod Illa Dixit), Call Me Maybe (Voca me, fortasse!), and Epic Fail (Defectio Epica).
