Bob Patrick
We told our Scribo contestant students about the genre possibilities and then we told
them to choose a genre and write about something that interested them. And that was it.
However, we feel like the kinds of things that we do all year feed into that moment of
writing. So, I'll list some of those kinds of activities:
--telling stories in Latin, especially the kind that we make up on the spot, or with stuffed
animals, or with pictures on the screen in front of us.
--reading stories together and discussing them in Latin
--follow up to stories: doing timed writes--students write all that they can remember
about the story for 5 minutes, on the clock, and then count their number of words. That's
the only scrutiny--how many words this time? Better than last time? Why? Why not?
--Having students read a story and then "translate it" through a drawing.
--Reading and choral translation--moves very quickly.
--Writing parallel stories based on the ones we read in CLC
We really felt like those students who have been able to do successful work for SCRIBO
have been "working on it" all year (or years) through these kinds of activities.
Caroline Miklosovic
Bob has covered our writing strategies well. I will just add another 2 cents. We do
different kinds of writing in my class. We have written extensions of stories from our
book, stories related to a topic in a story or character from the book, student and class
created stories, cartoons with Latin captions relaying a story we have read and also
student created ones. For the SCRIBO assignment, I left the subject wide open, so they
could write about something of interest to them. We worked in the computer lab for 2
days (about 50 minutes per period). We then went to the classroom. They read each
others' writing and gave comments about content, rather than grammar. I selected the
ones I thought stood out. They were not necessarily the students with the highest
averages. These students fine tuned their writings over the next couple of days. All of
them really liked the open ended assignment and using their genre of choice.