Crafting a Daily Lesson Plan

Meditations: 

• These surprisingly required no loss of curriculum to include.  They make the class so much more efficient that you can add them in without subtracting anything.

• I participate and ask students to not ask me anything until they are done.  It is a huge help for me when I have to teach a series of back to back classes.

• I do not insist students participate, only that they are quiet, screens are away and they don't interact with each other.  

• I allow up to 5 kids to take quick walks in this period if this is what they need.  If more than 5 kids want to take a walk I let them leave when another kid comes back.  

• I provide English and Latin books for them to read if they would prefer.

• Here is the list of meditations on Youtube that I pull from. The wordier ones are better at the start of the year.

Do now or video clip

• You can either do a movie talk or cultural video for a video clip.

• I insist all video clips are done in the target language, so I mute films if there is another language and narrate myself

• do nows are often simplified versions of the story to help kids level up. 

• When we do simplified stories I circulate and keep asking if anyone needs support.  Any vocabulary they ask for I put on the board so everyone can benefit. (this is in line with the "High Help, High Expectations" Model)

Story:

• Stories are mostly my own Fēlēs Cūriōsa for 6th grade or from Cambridge Latin for 7th and 8th.  Generally all have words hyperlinked to definitions. Again: high help, high expectations

• After students read the stories silently, I generally have them check in with their table to clarify anything and I circulate to help as needed.  

• Once I am sure they understood the story we do an activity that gets them repeating the story aloud or listen to it repeated.  This is another way to check understanding.  I find all activities that achieve this fall into three catagories: acting the story out, drawing the story or rewriting the story.  You can do all of those things in a variety of ways to keep students amused.

Exit ticket: this is almost always a summary in English or answering English comprehension questions.  Sometimes I let them look at the story, sometimes I don't (to make sure they don't tune out everything before the exit ticket).  Using their first language ensures that I actually see what they know.  See "Teaching Methodology" to see how I use exit tickets.