Movie Talk: Home Sweet Home

Happy new school year! This is my first post of the 2017-2018 school year. I'm teaching Latin 6-8 and a 6th grade Mythology course, so I've had a very busy first few weeks.

The 7th grade class I'm teaching has a wide range of students in it. I have two students who are completely new to Latin and our school, 5 who came from another teacher's class last year, and 8 who did CI with me last year in 6th grade. We have the entire bell curve of exposure and processing speeds.

With that in mind, I decided to start the year with a brief overview of declensions and conjugating in the present tense to get everyone acclimated to the concept of inflection. After a couple of pretty boring weeks, we moved into a CI unit based on Movie Talks. I recycled my La Luna talk from last year, and even though it was something that my 8 kiddos had done before, it proved to be a great intro to speaking and hearing Latin, as it focused on words with cognates (family members and stars/moon) and had a simple story line.

Next, we did a Movie Talk on "Home Sweet Home," a heart-wrenching (aren't they all???) digital short about two houses who become friends. I have one stellar student who is an incredibly fast processor, and I emailed him before class to ask if he would be willing to write a transcript of our Movie Talk while we were doing it. He agreed and sent me this Google Doc after class. I had written target vocabulary on the board before the film started and had students jot it down in their Interactive Notebooks. Then, I circled around on that vocab as the film played. We watched it a total of 3 times, and I encouraged students to do more of the narration each time we watched.

A few things I've learned after doing Movie Talks fairly consistently for a year:

• Students get frustrated when you stop the video. I promise to show it once through without stopping, and I usually stop it very few times in subsequent times through. They can talk over the action in Latin just fine, especially if the volume is low. 
• I don't need to write out the script in advance anymore. I just need to have a list of target vocab or structures for students and me to see, and I can usually hit them all. If the words are on the board, students will use them.
• My classes enjoy talking over the film. I just keep them in Latin as much as possible. 
• Students like to make things up that aren't in the film. We treat Move Talks kind of like One Word Pictures and get creative. 

Here is a link to the transcript that my 7th grade student wrote up. I made minor edits to adjust things like noun endings.

- Ashley Schneider