I am happy with where we are. I got my first syllabus written and am waiting for approval (an informal process). I wrote it for Spanish. I should post it to the blog.
Having progressed on several fronts at once, I find myself in a pretty good spot. The country grid is allowing formulaic call-and-response situations e.g. what do they eat in Germany? What is the common/favorite dish of Germany? It is a way to get students to begin listening to a lot of oral Spanish. It contributes to their fund of knowledge (a topic we covered yesterday in class) as well as covering the vocabulary items the National Spanish Examination calls for. I will learn a lot as they look up the platos tipicos of the country they chose to present on.
That project has gone very well. Thursday I will call them up individually and help them choose what items they want in the redacted version.
In the children’s book I am using to introduce them to reading, I find that in the back is a brief description of each child in the story. We’ll go over these tomorrow and write down in their notebooks the salient features identifying each child.
In Latin we are filling in graphic organizers on the characters in the new setting. This involves review of the vocabulary for features of character, gender agreement, etc. We will move to the next character as soon as we finish the first one. Yesterday we did a graphic organizer on conjugations and today I asked them to correct their letters to Clemens from Quintus based on that sheet and on the one detailing the nominative/accusative case distinctions.
What I haven’t done is picture files and retells for Latin, nor picture files for Spanish, nor the conversational profile. Nevertheless, things are progressing nicely and I am caught up on grading pretty much but not grades in Renweb. However, my lesson plans have become consistent and I am about to begin putting in objectives.