Education United Kingdom Project #14068

Inner-City Latin

by The Latin Programme

Project Report | Dec 19, 2017
A Day in the Life 2 - Sharon van Dijk

By Sharon van Dijk and Lucia Yandoli | Teacher and Project Leader

Sharon Teaching

Sharon van Dijk “At this young age they are so excited by everything”

Teacher, Sharon van Dijk (25), talks about her teaching day in two London schools for the Latin Programme, her fascinating research cataloguing Latin poetry and why The Latin Programme stands out.

‘I have a really early start on my teaching days. I’m up by 6am so that I have time to pack my things, eat some cereal, drink some tea and make my lunch. I have a long commute from Hertford where I live, changing onto the underground at Finsbury Park and on into Victoria, Central London where both my schools are based. I use the commuting time to read and prepare for the day ahead.I arrive around 8.30 at my first school in time to prepare my resources. I teach one year six class at 9am and two year three classes during the morning. In the afternoon I teach two mixed year four and five classes at another local primary school.

Before becoming a Latin Programme teacher in 2016, I previously taught Latin in secondary schools. The Latin Programme has a very different approach to language learning. Latin Programme pupils get up off their seats a lot more, using kinesthetic techniques to learn new material and there are more games and songs too. My favourite game is ‘magistra dicit’ (Simon says in Latin). The focus is also much more firmly on the structure of language at The Latin Programme. For example, I wouldn’t usually have covered all the Latin noun cases and their functions until Year 9 in my secondary school teaching. At the Latin Programme we are introducing this in Year 4!

The other aspect of the Latin Programme that I love is working with primary school children. At this young age they are so excited by everything. They have their own favourite verbs, like ‘necare’ (to kill) or ‘ambulare’ (to walk), and they love the challenge of learning a new language in depth. We’ve enjoyed looking for Latin inscriptions on (old) pound coins, and learning Latin football mottos.

I think that the Latin Programme faces a big challenge surviving all the cuts to school funding at the moment. I hope that more schools can still offer The Latin Programme to pupils despite this.

My teaching day finishes at 3.30pm and I usually arrive home in Hertford by 5pm, in time to eat and then head on to choir practice. Beyond singing, I also like horse riding and I play the guitar. I’ve even developed a few new songs for The Latin Programme – like the ‘sum es est’ song which are now being taught in schools across London.

On the days that I am not teaching, I am studying for a PhD as part of a research team led by Dr Victoria Moul at King’s College London. The title of our research, which is funded by the Leverhulme Trust, is ‘Latin Verse in English Manuscript Verse Miscellanies, 1550-1700’. This involves working with original manuscripts in archives across the UK. We are looking at neo-Latin verse (written in the early modern period) in miscellanies (collections of pieces of writing by different authors). Some of the poetry has been written by school children in the days when Latin was the language of education from when a child began school at age 8 right up until they left university. Some of the poetry I’ve seen is by well-known English authors like Milton who wrote in Latin to appeal to a wider international audience. Sometimes I come across beautifully illustrated poems to commemorate a king or queen and even figure poems -poems written in the shape of something. It is so exciting to discover unknown work and catalogue it for readers of the future.

My research really demonstrates how fundamental Latin was to the development of British education and to the development of the English language. It is wonderful that our Latin Programme pupils are contributing to that second life of Latin in schools themselves and in doing so are developing a deeper understanding of English.’

This week I’ve been…

Reading Blair Worden The English Civil Wars 1640-1660 as background reading for my PhD.

Listening to Christmas carols and Christmas songs.

Watching the BBC series Dickensian on Netflix.

Permalink

Oct 2, 2017
A Day in the Life of a Latin Programme Teacher

By Jonathan Goddard | Teaching and Learning Director

Jonathan Teaching

"Each week I lead my pupils on a new step and show them what they can achieve"

Teaching and Learning Director, Jonathan Goddard (37), on a typical day’s teaching in London schools with The Latin Programme. He tells us about the challenges and rewards of the innovative Programme to help improve literacy in schools. He tells us about the daily challenge schools face and why you should support the Programme’s future.

Early Rising

"I usually wake up early – between 4 and 6am while my wife and 18-month-old son Blake are still sleeping. It’s a good time for creativity and for thinking about things that nourish my work. I like to take a moment to visualize what I want to achieve with my day. I’ll then have porridge or cereal with my son and drink a lot of coffee because I'm tired.

I leave my home in Peckham, South London at around 7.15am to make sure I’m in school on time and photocopy teaching resources. There’s often a queue for the photocopier and schools have a really limited budget for this so that is what made me think of designing some new interactive resources this year for iPads (Jonathan has designed a new Interactive Latin Textbook for iBooks coming soon).

School staff are always friendly and really welcome you as one of their community. That’s really nice but it also suits my nature to travel from school to school for my teaching. I like to be independent and be in different environments. Each day I will teach six classes of between 20-35 pupils in two different inner-city London schools. Sometimes I’ve even taught classes of 43-43 pupils. There’s not much space to move around in classes as big as that."

A Typical Lesson

"Teaching starts at 9am. A lesson will start with an interactive activity or role play such as Gladiators, ‘Simon Says’ in Latin, listening to a song or doing a clapping game. I use these exercises to get pupils moving and establish a tone in the room before we settle down to work.

Then we usually introduce a grammar point in English. Literacy is a big challenge for many of the schools we work with and it really lays a foundation for success across the whole curriculum, even subjects like maths. After that, we’ll begin linking this grammar with the Latin, applying the same rules and relating them constantly back to English.

After 3-4 hours of back-to-back lessons I travel by train or bus between schools on my lunch break and try to eat something on the way. Once a week I can sit down and eat some West Indian food in the Roxy Bar in Hoxton."

The Pupils

"At the end of each day I’ve taught over 150 individual pupils. They are little firecrackers: absorbent and ambitious. They want to do well but sometimes need to be shown how to persevere, how to structure their thoughts and work independently. By the end of the Programme they have learnt as much in weekly lessons as pupils in private schools who have three times that amount of Latin lessons per week.

I love the challenge of teaching such difficult material: material that requires real intellectual discipline to master it. When pupils develop these skills it is incredibly satisfying. It is wonderful to hear stories of my former pupils who are going on to study languages at secondary school or even university and see how excited they are about this new content and how much they’ve achieved.

I’m not a classics scholar. I stopped studying Latin at School when I was 18 and I was skeptical at first about the Latin Programme, but it has proved robust. What I see more and more in schools today is the challenge that literacy presents but the schools we work in are addressing that challenge creatively. And it is working.

I think The Latin Programme has a great future."

This week I…

Read lots of conspiracy-related trivia, Aesop's Fables, The Alphabet Book.
Heard the 'Basketball Breakdown' podcast, 'In Our Time' and Wes Montgomery
Watched: Lots of YouTube videos

Links:

Permalink

Jul 5, 2017
Carmina Latina: How TLP teaches Latin through song and rap

By Nikita Nicheperovich | Volunteer Teacher

TLP teacher, Laura Shiels, with pupils from Argyle

As The Latin Programme seeks to improve English literary in state primary schools through the study of Latin, we use a diverse range of teaching methods to make learning Latin accessible, engaging and fun. One of these involves the use of songs and raps to teach children aspects of Latin grammar.

Any student of Latin dreads learning the endless grammar tables. Surely they can only be learned through mere repetition? Well, it has in fact been scientifically proven that words set to catchy music make it easier to remember those pesky bits of grammar!

Music and education have been talked about as a match made in heaven since the middle of the last century. An article from 1969, for example, states that ‘songs provide a means of increasing the amount of repetition possible without losing the learner’s interest’, and so ‘help the teacher by consolidating his teaching’.[1] Yet new scientific research has come to light since the turn of the millennium, and has shown that rhythmical music lyrics can ‘itch’ our brain into creating memories.[2] What’s even more interesting is that repetitions of that particular piece then ‘scratch’ the itch, and help us to produce clearer memories of the images invoked by the lyrics!

With this in mind, our teaching syllabus aims to use songs to their full potential. Songs composed by our teachers are then sung by the students, which are used to reinforce the teaching throughout the lesson. While we are always looking to increase our repertoire, the current favourites include the ‘Noun Song’ and the ‘First Declension Song’, composed and recorded by our teacher Jonathan Goddard!

Examples of our songs and can be found by following the links below –

‘Noun Song’ – https://soundcloud.com/user-549272957/noun-song

‘Bo Bis Bit Song: The Future Tense Song’ – https://soundcloud.com/user-549272957/bo-bis-bit-the-future-tense-song

‘The Case Song’ – https://vimeo.com/68384986

‘How we teach Latin and literacy’ – https://vimeo.com/139577445

[1] Richards, J. (1969) ‘Songs in Language Learning’, TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 161-174.

[2] Anuta, J. (2006) Probing Question: What Makes a Song Catchy? (http://news.psu.edu/story/141354/2006/06/05/research/probing-question-what-makes-song-catchy)

Permalink

‹ 1 ... 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ... 12 ›

About Project Reports

Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.

If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.