Salvete, omnes!

Another post today to share how impressed I am with the 6th graders in Latin II. They are translating and studying vocabulary for Stage 14 in Cambridge Latin Course Unit 2 and have truly mastered the grammatical and cultural topics (latest vocabulary quiz below).

Our daily routine includes saying the day of the week in Latin and I think they have all the days memorized (sign from classroom below). They also came up withe their own clever sentences as part of our vocabulary study–they could only use words in the current list, a real challenge (a few examples attached).

We will continue to work on the best ways to stay organized and focused in class: having only what we need for the current task on our desks, putting away handouts in our folders, writing clearly and neatly on our quizzes and in our notebooks, arriving on time and bringing only necessary materials. They are responding well to these directions. Optime!

What a delight to meet the 6th graders in this year’s Latin II class! They have already started to follow the routines of the class, writing down Latin phrases of the day and saying how they are each day: “quid agis hodie?” (How are you doing today?). Most reply “bene!” or “optime!”

Students finished the week with maps, exploring the geography connected to our story which will mainly take place in Britannia, Aegyptus and Italia.

Here are a couple of the maps, our first calendar of assignments and the “Quid agis hodie?” sign in our classroom.

Latin IV students had a productive and fun first week in Latin IV! We reviewed noun forms, played some review games, studied one set of vocabulary and created sentences with those words on white boards in a class activity. I have been so impressed by their preparation and participation! Here is a picture of one of the white boards illustration (ruri = in the country) and the first quiz (10 pt. vocabulary).

Students are doing well with the first Book of Caesar’s Gallic Wars (De Bello Gallico in Latin). Caesar’s Latin has its challenges, but is exactly what these students have prepared for all these years. Last week, after some review of Caesar’s style, students illustrated the end of Book I on the board. They did a great job with the details in the Latin text!

SOR Latin students are making their way from Latin III to Latin IV-level work as they add verbs in the passive voice. They are also practicing with new vocabulary including numbers and terms for building monuments in Rome in the 1st century (tigum = beam, polyspaston = crane, massae marmoris = blocks of marble, tollebantur ad arcum = were being lifted to the arch). We also took the time to make some Valentine cards.

Here are some examples of their fun classwork and our current Stage 30 presentation (also posted on Google Classroom). They are doing great work!

SOR Latin Feb-March 2023

Field Day. 10/26/22 CIS Students had a wonderful day at the University of Minnesota!

Schools who came to the CIS Field Day organized by College in the Schools and the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Religions and Cultures: Providence Academy, Parnassus Preparatory School, Eagle Ridge Academy with Nova Classical Academy, St. Paul Central High School. Along the way, the Nova group came across 3 of our PSEO students and a recent Nova grad attending the U, who all were glad to visit with us.

9:15 – 9:30: Walk across the river to Andersen Library (https://www.lib.umn.edu/spaces/andersen), then 9:30 – 10:30: Special Collections Manuscript and Papyri Presentation with Tim Johnson: Tim put out some artifacts on tables for students to see: a cuneiform tablet, a page from a medieval manuscript and some pieces of papyrus preserved between glass sheets. Students asked great questions about the source of the materials, problems inherent in archiving such a huge amount of stuff. We were amazed at how quickly the vellum manuscripts were starting to curl in the warm room.

Tim is an archivist who recently put together the Minnesota History Museum’s new exhibit on Sherlock Holmes. The largest collection of materials related to Sherlock Holmes is at the University of Minnesota. The Anderson Library has billions of artifacts stored in two huge caverns underneath the library: from Sumerian Cuneiform tablets to the largest collection of children’s literature, the YMCA collection (“Want to know how basketball was invented—it was at a YMCA”) which the university archives but does not own.

10:40 – 11:00: Presentation by Spencer Cole (Director of Undergraduate Studies) on departmental majors and programs: Spencer Cole talked about the range of studies and paths for majors and minor in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Religions and Cultures. He had two images on his opening screen: A portrait of a woman named Isadora from Roman Egypt showing a woman, whose Greek name means “gift to Isis”, with Roman style hair and painted in Egypt on a panel of a mummy case. The other image was the oldest manuscript of Vergil’s Aeneid, Aeneas sailing off leaving Dido in her Greek-style temple in Carthage.

Spencer highlighted a current introductory Greek course given by a new member of the department, Simone Oppen whose research in the material culture of Corinth is shared in her beginning Greek course. He also told the students that there are all sorts of interesting courses offered. One current student has a double major in Latin and Art History (and was a CIS student from St. Paul Central). Another student is majoring in Neuroscience and minoring in Classics. 

11:00 – 11:20: Presentation by our host Charley about Classical Architectural elements at UMN East Bank: An overview of the orders, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and examples on campus started with a view of a temple at Aphaia on the Greek island of Aegina dating to about 500 BCE. Charley discussed the temple, the fact that the statues on the pediment all appear to be smiling or at least content as they are in the stance of fighting a war, with Athena standing in the middle. Charley introduced the students to the terms triglyph (the three horizontal bar decorations above the columns) and metope, the spaces between the triglyphs. Then we toured the campus to see some Doric and Ionic columns and took a group photo before lunch.

1-1:50 Wangensteen Historical Library visit: Their current exhibit was about medical aspects of some comic books stories. Students also got to see and turn the pages of some amazingly rare and expensive Renaissance books: early printing in Latin and Greek. This visit was a big hit!

We spent the last hour at the Weisman Art Museum.

Students made great skeletons this year and labelled the body parts in Latin. We watched two ancient ghost stories depicted by “Magister Craft” and it was a nice break for all:

The 8th graders are finishing the year with original Latin written by Pliny the Younger, famous for his letter to the historian Tacitus about the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. Pliny governed the province of Bithynia on the coast of the Black Sea (indicated on the maps posted earlier), now a part of modern Turkey. In this week’s letters, Pliny tells about a fire that broke out in Nicomedia and the efforts to set up fire brigades for the future. They had water pumps, but not enough help and the fire destroyed a Temple of Isis and other public buildings.

To finish the work, they illustrated the letters (and took a 5 pt. quiz, as usual!):

Students enjoyed a day after MCA’s doing drawings of trees with their botanical Latin names for this year’s Arbor Day. Some very talented artists in this group of SOL and SOR Latin IV students!

Latin IV students are studying geography of the Roman world this week. Here are some of the maps they worked on. They had to locate and label major sites of imperial Rome and we also spent some time on Italy and looked at beautiful pictures of Mediterranean and Adriatic Sea islands.