Declensions Roundtable

I have just recently taught my Latin IA students about the first three declensions. We are using the textbook Latin is Fun, and it introduces the cases in a piecemeal fashion. My students were doing great with the nominative, accusative, and ablative, but weren't going to be able to do much without learning about genitive stems for nouns, so I decided to go whole-hog with them.

After doing two days of talking about case uses, applying them to some short Latin compositions, and writing the declension chart in our notes, it was time for my students to do some declension practice.

For this "Declensions Roundtable" activity, I made large-font pages with 2 animal words on each page. They were from declensions 1-3, but didn't include neuters (for obvious reasons). I had each kid get out a special pen/pencil/marker color and told them they should write three answers on a page before heading off to find another page. Their answers could either add to the paradigm that had been started or make corrections to previous answers. There were a lot of corrections to be made! I put on some Taylor Swift and monitored as they moved around and declined. I had them turn in the pages once all of the answers were written correctly.

Pretty fun lesson, and a very low-stress way for my sixth graders to get in declension practice.

Here's the list of vocabulary words that we declined.

And here's a short video of my students during the lesson.