Planning the year

Planning out a CI Latin program

Step 1: envisioning 3 years. Goals and expectations.
This will be year 4 at my school, a large urban public high school in the SF Bay Area. I am slowly but surely transitioning from what was a traditional grammar-translation  program, to a more inclusive program based on CI principles. While our official textbook is LFA, I rarely use it, except for some adapted stories, and as a choice for FVR.

We still offer a 4th year combined AP and IB class.  My goal for the first three years, is that students achieve a comfort level (fluency?) reading and writing (and to a lesser extent speaking) level-appropriate Latin.  By level-appropriate, I do not mean unadapted classical literature.

That said, by the end of year 3, students will have read poems by Catullus, selections from the following: Cicero’s De Amicitia, Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, Petronius’ Satyricon, Pliny’s letter about the eruption of Vesuvius, and maybe some Vergil. To what extent students read unadapted versions of these largely depends on 1) the readiness of the class as a whole and 2) whether individuals want to tackle a more advanced level of a reading (I generally test on the level just below the unadapted.)

Here is a very broad outline of the three years, sorted into units based on readings and/or content-based activities. In addition, I have the NLE syllabus history/culture topics which will be introduced in the various units when relevant, or as warmups or separate culture activities. Most of the readings mentioned are available in multiple (tiered/embedded) versions. More details and links will be included in the documents which map out each year of study.