Mock Trojan War

For the past two years, Lesson planning in the Latin Program coordinated with a one-week "Humans vs. Zombies" game played campus-wide to help release stress before finals.

Teaching about the Trojan War and its connections with modern storytelling and apocalypse myths, I helped my students build a Trojan Horse and City of Troy in the Football field where we reenacted the battle of Troy as a culmination to the Zombie Tag game. 

Both fun and educational, students were both creating and writing all week in preparation.  Samples of their writing can be found in the accompanying links. 

Founding of Rome "Reenactment"

While so much learning takes place in the classroom, I've found that students understand the stories more when they get to live and experience them for themselves.  After a series of lectures, group work, and in class-writing translations, we go outside every year and re-play the events leading up to that day of both fame and infamy when the world's greatest city was founded, but by a brother killing a brother.  After the students act out the grand scenario and scene, they analyze the story, to explain the events and what they meant for the Roman people and their future history (not to mention our own).  This has evolved into one one of our most popular class days.  

Roman Newspaper Projects

This was a very popular project among the students.  We did a month's research, learning how to use sources, write journalistic pieces, make bibliographies. present information in an engaging way, collaborate with a group, find relevant visual aids, and edit the final project for presentation. 

Each "Front page" newspaper page was a full-sized poster and they made a lively classroom visual aid for students throughout the program to learn their Roman history and culture.