I teach all levels of Latin to rambunctious high school students and have been doing so for the past 9 years. I adore teaching Latin! I adore my silly, immature, hilarious teenagers who bring me funny comic strips, coloring pages, and handmade cards to display in my room. My students love to show off projects and artwork and I love to put their work all over my room.
For my first 6 years of teaching, I "floated" into other teachers' classrooms at 2 different schools. My sense of community and classroom was built around a rolling cart...very hard to do! I have had a great room for the past 3 years now but I recently gave it up to be with my foreign language colleague in a portable flat top and to give another teacher with gigantic class sizes a bigger classroom. I do not regret moving but now I am lacking some things that I feel I truly need to instill and promote creativity in my new classroom. I have a smartboard which is very nice but only one person can use it at a time. I liked to have conjugating competitions and sentence diagramming races on my whiteboard in my old room and I just can't do that with just a smartboard.
Therefore, I really would like to have a white board installed on my woefully bare wall! I would also like a cork bulletin board to display the enormous amount of work that my students do. One of my favorite lessons to do with my Latin II students is to make paper bag Cyclopes (to accompany a translation on Ulysses's encounter with Polyphemus). My students love this project and so do I; I display them either on a bulletin board, complete with googly eye(s) and weird outfits, or on a giant strip of kraft paper, drawn to represent the cave of the Cyclops.
By donating a white board, bulletin board, and a large roll of Kraft paper for my new Latin classroom, my students will be able to express their creative sides in addition to translating Latin and conjugating verbs. My classroom will be an interactive classroom where students are encouraged to get up, write on the board, draw a picture of Caesar, or create some columns to decorate the room.
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