Think about coming to the Taft School in Watertown, CT to work with your colleagues and Jill Crooker on developing or enhancing your AP Latin curriculum.
Here are the descriptions for this coming summer.
July 3-7. 2017 B Week: Helping Our Students Become Ready for the Course & Exam
This weeklong workshop is designed to help teachers guide students along the way in better translating (literal translation) and writing (essay) skills. Some techniques will include adapting and using readings from Vergil and Caesar to incorporate into instruction at the beginning of the AP year or in the year before AP. The readings will help in the transition to significantly more difficult authentic text and will also focus upon grammar and reading instruction. In addition, we will write short questions for many passages in the syllabus and incorporate sense unit separations into all literal translations. This work will focus on Book 1 of the Aeneid and Book 1 of Bellum Gallicum. The bulk of our questions and essay prompts will elucidate what these two texts (authors) have in common. Participants will leave with passages, essay questions, teaching techniques, and strategies to enhance reading and understanding Latin. Participants are encouraged to bring their current textbooks.If you have questions or need more information contact Jill Crooker at [email protected].
July 10-14, 2017 C Week: AP LATIN: What does the Aeneid have to do with de Bello Gallico?
The intent of this workshop is to lead teachers through all of Caesar’s De Bello Gallico in the AP Latin syllabus. We will work on teaching strategies for writing analytical essays and developing short answer questions; develop a list of themes from the Caesar passages and pair them, where possible, with lines from Vergil; score student essays and short answer questions from 2017.The workshop will help teachers realize that two works have more similarities than one might think. We will go beyond the 7 themes in the Framework to think about others such as parent/child and storms. These themes not only enhance ability to prepare students to write effective essays, they infuse the classroom with discussion that will make each day more than translation and trudging through text. Teachers new to AP as well as experienced teachers will have ample opportunity to learn/discuss how to structure an effective classroom. We will work our way through the methods for literal translation and its scoring, writing essay questions and seeing them as class discussion in written form. If you have questions or need more information contact Jill Crooker at [email protected].