Daily log – breaking reading into sections & assigning to groups

My students are pushing through, reading a story a day. I have slowed down with my second year students because it is clear they have not absorbed the vocabulary. That is my fault for pushing them too fast. They are such good students they seduced me into thinking they could handle all that input without reinforcing it.

What all classes like in this somewhat pressured reading schedule is to break into groups of 3 or so and take one section of the story, process it, then explain it to the rest of the class. I let them choose how to present it. Some read a translation, some summarize, some even act it out or draw it on the board. The presentations are done in English, a concession to the speed with which we are reading the stories.

The rest of the class takes notes on the presentations which can then be taken into the end-of-the-week test over the Stage (unit).

One interesting phenomenon is that they believe tests in English force them to understand the story (they have a fresh copy of the story in Latin in front of them for the exam). They say that when the questions are in Latin, they tend to scan the story for similar phrases and just copy those out. That fits with what I was seeing on tests in Latin.

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