An Update from Across Town

Hello! I hope your first days or weeks of school are off to a great start! I wanted to write a short post today to give a little information about the new position that I have taken on this year.

I left St. Andrew's, where I used to teach with Parva and Situla, to join the faculty at St. Stephen's Episcopal School. My position here is different in many ways. I'm teaching three sections in the Middle School (Latin IA, IB, and II) and one in the Upper School (Latin I). The chair of the Classics Department is now teaching 7th grade English, and he will be mentoring me to assume his chair position in a year or so. The teachers at this school have used primarily the traditional Grammar/Translation (GT) approach and use Oxford Latin Course. I have never used Oxford and hadn't even read the textbooks until this summer as I was preparing for classes.

I plan to begin my year with more G/T than CI, since it's what the veteran students are familiar with and it's how the materials in our shared resources folder are written. With 4 preps, I won't have a lot of time to write new lessons that adapt each chapter of Oxford to fit with a hybrid G/T-CI approach like I did with Cambridge in the past. I also want the students to feel a sense of success and progress as they begin a new year, and I think that moving to a heavy CI-style of teaching would throw them off.

My Latin IA class, which is comprised of 8 sixth graders, will be the place that I plan to implement CI the most this year. The curriculum that I inherited doesn't use Oxford in Latin IA, so it is very open to student/teacher interest. The students will take the National Exploratory Latin Exam and the National Mythology Exam in the spring. Their previous teacher used Latin is Fun with this class last year, and I also plan to use this text as a source of vocabulary and grammar concepts, but there's no pressure to move at any particular pace or in any particular order. Latin IA is the class I'm most excited about, as it offers the most freedom.

I'm planning to use an Interactive Notebook with my Latin IA class so they can organize their vocabulary, writings, drawings, and grammar notes all in one place. I would love tips and ideas from other teachers who use Interactive Notebooks or Journals with their students!


Oh, and one final note about the challenges of this year: for the first time after 7 years of teaching, I am now a traveling teacher! I will teach all 4 of my classes in 4 different rooms.  This is going to be so challenging for me. I'm working on developing systems of digital record keeping in place of paper systems I've used in the past, and I'm relying extensively on Google Classroom to post assignments. It's going to be a year of growth!