Because of weather conditions last Thursday, we have rescheduled a meeting for this Thursday. We will be meeting in Room 138. If you are unable to attend, please check out the flyer we put together.

If you would like additional info, or have questions, please contact Mr. Susel (ke_rsusel@kentschools.net) or Mr. Phillips (ke_jphillips@kentschools.net).

By the way… the early registration deadline of January 15, 2010, will lock in the 2009 prices (note: the cost of this trip is not only less expensive than the 2009 trip, but it is only $60 more expensive than the 2007 trip was!), so there are definitely advantages to getting on board early.

Ciao!

The Latin Club will be meeting on:

Thursday, January 14, in Room 224 at 2:45

Come see how we make pizzelles. And enjoy a little coffee, too.

It’s been a while since I posted last. I do apologize. There are two reasons for this:

1. I wanted to see if anybody would notice. Only a couple of you did after about five days.
2. I’ve been a bit busy outside of school and haven’t had the energy at the end of the day to do it.

Again, I apologize to the couple of you who noticed. I’ll give it my best shot to get things up here in a timely manner again.

So where are we?

We find ourselves these days in Chapter 7. But we’re doing things a little differently. We’re starting to diversify a bit with regard to ability levels. Some of you require a little more attention to more basic material, while others are a little further along and are ready to handle more challenging material. I’ve had a couple of different sets of daily work to accommodate this.

Any way we slice it, we’re all looking at some new course terminology as well as new endings with regard to the properties of Latin nouns (and adjectives). What we found was that there are three properties of every Latin noun (and adjective):

• Case (nominative or accusative)
• Gender (masculine or feminine)
• Number (singular or plural)

We dealt with Number in the first couple of chapters and Gender in the last chapter. And we’ve kind of dealt with Case since we started talking about subjects, subject complements and direct objects (the functions associated with cases). In chapter 7, we’ll be taking a closer look at Case.

What is case?

Case is difficult to define in a non-confusing way. So let’s look at it this way:

Case is the property of nouns (and adjectives), reflected by their endings, under which specific noun functions are organized.

What does that mean? It means that we’re going to learn various case names, under which we’ll be able to organize specific noun functions like subject, subject complement and direct object. Have a look:

• Nominative Case
1. Subject
2. Subject Complement
• Accusative Case
1. Direct Object

The nominative case is a case under which we can organize the noun functions of subject and subject complement. The accusative case is a case under which we can organize the noun function of direct object.

How do we recognize the case of a noun?

You may have guessed that the way that we recognize the case of a noun is by the noun’s ending:

So what now?

What we can say in looking at endings and identifying case when we come across a noun in a sentence or reading is this:

Latin nouns that end with -i are nouns in the nominative case. As such, nominative nouns ending with -i can serve as either a subject or subject complement in the given sentence.

Latin nouns that end with -as are nouns in the accusative case. As such, accusative nouns ending with -as serve as a direct object in a given sentence (as long as there isn’t a “direct object killer” directly in front of it).

That’s it. Simple, aye?

We’ve been doing this all along. We just didn’t have names for the cases. We were only looking at the functions.

Now some of you spent the period today working on identifying the properties of Latin nouns (and adjectives) on a Chapter 7 – Noun Identification Worksheet. Some of you were able to finish this quickly and just to solidify it, you moved on to a second worksheet in the same format containing different nouns (Chapter 7 – Noun Identification Worksheet II).

Others of you moved on to apply your knowledge of endings, case and function in the form of some quick kernel charts of sentences from Exercise 7B. Those of you, who did this and made it through before the end of the period, worked even further ahead into the realm of actually forming nouns in the cases required in Workbook Exercise 7D from the Chapter 7 Workbook Packet.

It’s important to know that, eventually, we’ll all be doing this work. I just understand that some are ready and some need a little more remediation to get there. No big deal. Take advantage of this and push yourselves. A little honesty with “where you are” and a willingness to put your nose to the grindstone will definitely benefit you in the end.

We’ll go over these items as needed tomorrow.

Have a great evening!

There’s only one thing that these pictures could mean. How about taking a stroll through the streets of ancient Pompeii via Google Street View? I think the Forum is a good starting point! This is very cool. Enjoy!

And don’t forget our introductory meeting for the Roman Italy Trip 2011 on Wednesday, December 9 at 6:30 p.m. in the Media Center. If you’re even remotely interested in taking that stroll by foot (rather than by finger), stop on by!

View Larger Map

Today we started a new thing, which caught some of you off-guard. We’ll get to that in a minute. Our work today started with a “catch up” and a refresher regarding noun-adjective agreement and charting adjectives in our kernel-modifier charts. We then went over the translation that you worked on in class yesterday (Chapter 6 Story: Early in the Day). This didn’t take long and left us with plenty of time for our new thing.

I needed to see where you’re at as we move forward from chapter to chapter. One way that I do this is to make sure that I’m walking around and talking with you, answering questions, etc. as we’re working on various exercises and other work. Another way is to do what we did today.

Today I gave you a more formal way of demonstrating your whereabouts with the Chapter 6 material – a mid-chapter assessment. Yes, it was a surprise. And I did not mean to stress you out (if you were, many weren’t) but again, I need to see some data. So there we have it.

We took a mid-chapter assessment, a quick (10-15 minutes) piece of work that I collected and have looked over. Some of you were worried about grades. Don’t worry. I’m just using this as a gauge for planning purposes. Some of you are good to go. Others need some more practice.

After the assessment, I asked you to to make a decision. Some of you chose to move on and to continue working on your chapter translation. Others chose to work with me on the skills necessary to really get a grip on these kernel-modifier charts.

I have to say that it’s awesome that so many of you chose to get some more practice with those charts. It’s awesome that you had the guts to say “hey, I’m not where I want to be” and to take responsibility for getting that taken care of. Keep doing that when you need to!

So we worked through some sentences on the Exercise 6C Charting Worksheet that I handed out (yes, I know two sentences there are identical, just skip it). The number one resource that you needed, you had, the Chapter 6 Noun/Adjective Endings sheet.

We placed that endings sheet right above each sentence, matched endings with functions, charted them and then made sure that our nouns and adjectives were charted as they should be – nouns as kernel items, adjectives as adjectival modifiers. Here’s the coolest thing:

So many of you said “oh man, is it really this easy?” and I said “YES!”. Whatever the reason, whether you were making a mountain out of a mole hill or something else was going on, the number of you who “got it” today was absolutely great!

So yes, the mid-chapter assessment was telling, not only to me but to you, as it was meant to be. We’re going to keep doing this in every chapter along our way. It hit you just the way it should have, by offering you a bit of a jolt and giving you the indication that you needed to begin to take responsibility for your own learning. It helped me as well.

So good work today, folks!

Keep on keepin’ on!

See you tomorrow!

I hope you all had a nice and sensible Thanksgiving break! Breaks are great but eventually they do end. Sometimes it’s hard to get back into the swing of things.

So today I thought we should ease back into it by just working with the chapter readings that some of you received before the break and others got today.

Latin I:

You’re reading the Chapter 6 Story: Early in the Day. Focus yourselves on the ties that bind the nouns and adjectives that you come across in that reading (gender, function and number). I gave you an updated endings sheet that explicitly pointed out the new features that makes this one different from those you received before. It really does help to refer to this when translating, if you get stuck.

Most of you worked quite well through a good bit of this today. So we’ll be reading through most of this tomorrow and talking more about gender, nouns and adjectives. Great stuff!

Latin II:

You read through the beginning of the Chapter 18 Story: Arrival at the Inn. The primary grammatical point we were talking about before the break is noun-adjective agreement, specifically third declension adjectives. We can no longer (really haven’t for a while) rely on endings alone to serve as the indicator of which adjective goes with which nouns. We’ve GOT to have a real ability to recall endings (or at least locate them in your resources).

We’ll be reading through a portion of this tomorrow before we get back into some charting and working with noun-adjective pairs.

Latin III:

You, too, did some translation work in the Chapter 31 Story: Pseudolus, which required that you focus on present passive infinitives (we’ll look closer at these tomorrow) and the ablative of cause. Important stuff.

We’ll be using the beginning of this story as a backdrop for some grammatical discussion and kernel charting tomorrow.

All Levels:

Let’s keep vigilant! Midterms will be here before you know it. So now is not the time to become lazy. We’ve made it this far in tact (very well, I should say). We can make it a little longer. Just keep working! Can you believe the year is almost half over?? Amazing!

See you all in the morning!