This is a story I created to help my ELLs review the follow content items:

1. family members
2. days of the week
3. wants and requirements
4. routines
5. question words

We also practised these activities:

• reading (silently or out loud)
• discussion/circling
• reading comprehension
• listening comprehension
• charting​

This resource includes:

1. a simple English story about Marla and her weekly routine
2. a presentation in PDF format of this story with visuals​
3. a PPT version of the story with visuals
4. comprehension questions that can be printed for students to write on or as a discussion after reading

I used this with my ELL learners who were newcomers to the country. Since it is written in basic English, I really wanted to go slowly with this and ensure comprehension. Prior to writing this I had asked students about things they wanted to do and things they had to do. This influenced the things in the story as well. 

I don't want to write a minute by minute lesson plan for this, but I do want to share how I did it by sharing what I considered in between each slide. Take what you want from this and leave the rest :) 
Reading Ideas

• I mostly read this out loud since this was a class of newcomers.
• If a student wanted to read out loud, I let them.
• Once the class became comfortable, we read it together as one voice.
• I never corrected pronunciation unless it hindered comprehension OR the student asked. 

Discussion/Circling While Reading

• Since this was a newcomer class, I started with a fairly traditional Comprehensible Input formula for questions:
  • yes/no question (yes answer)
  • yes/no question (no answer - may be multiple questions)
  • repeat yes/no question with yes answer
  • either or question (may be multiple questions)
  • open ended question (may be multiple questions)
• This is also a great opportunity for personalised questions. Since I had already polled the class I knew who I could comfortably ask about their weekly routine. Then I could expand and include others. 
  • ​e.g. while Maria LOVES to dance and dances daily, Martin hates dancing. But... he watches it on TikTok. 

Embedded Chart Practice

• I had students draw a weekly chart on paper. I showed them the blank chart from the story and we wrote in the days of the week. Since we are in the US, we started with Sunday, but we discussed how they are more familiar with starting on Monday. 
• For each activity, we marked our own charts first and then I revealed the slide with the answers. 
• I also circled which days each activity was done each time we referenced the chart. 

​Final Comprehension Check/Other Activities

• I used this as part of a larger lesson, so I did not include any writing when I did this.
• The TPT file includes questions that can be used as discussion or printed to give to students
  
• Other ideas to consider:
  
  • ​Treat this as a dictation/pictation. Read the sentences twice each and after students write them down, they draw pictures to go with them.
  • Give students the sentences and pictures separately. Have them recreate the story and match pictures to sentences.
    
  • ​Give students the sentences only from this and have them create a comic strip.
    

I originally started working with this poem as part of a Latin III story for October in 2017. There were some new things I wanted to try out and I love talking about different kinds of witches and surprising cultural facts. This poem features garlic and it's "nocens" attributes. My IIIs enjoyed the poem and our discussion that followed and so I've kept in my back pocket for when another time would arise and it could be useful. Enter 2021 :). In wanting to do some scary stories, my Latin I colleagues and I each chose a story for this most wonderful time of the year and I pulled this poem out! What follows in this post is a section on how I taught it for Latin III and resources and how I'm teaching it with Latin I and resources. Enjoy! Unless otherwise listed, work is my own. 

If you haven't read the original of this poem, you can do so here with my translation, plus a traditional translation below it (retrieved from the Perseus Project). When considering this for my Latin IIIs, I considered a few different things:

• length
• vocabulary familiarity
• Grammar familiarity

My Latin  IIIs had started requesting explicit grammar, so I always looked at my texts to see if I could incorporate more of what they knew so they could see it and practise with it. 

Ultimately I think you can see the most adaptation in the length and vocabulary. We didn't have long with this sidebar from our unit, so over the course of three days, we did a few activities with this work:

I used "vs." here... not because it's a battle, but because most high school students won't see Horace at all. I readily admit that when I originally looked at this poem for Latin III years ago, I was scared. When I studied Horace in grad school I felt like... every time I started to get him as an author, he'd just laugh at me. The second time around, I felt better. I had already done the back work: I'd translated the poem, I'd compared my work against a published work, I had already adapted it once. 

This lesson was part of three stories that my colleagues and I chose for the October season. We decided to include a codeswitched passage for each story and do that on Day 1. We also paired this with a Blooket game made up of words students said they needed more practice with. 

These lessons are from the year 2020. In this year, after doing many years of straight history, I wanted to look at culture and perspective via folktales. I grew up surrounded by Southern folktales, religious mythologies, and fables, and as I got older I learned the folktales of my ethnic traditions in Ireland, Italy, and Latvia. Storytelling is an important element to every culture and should be celebrated :)

Each story below was either taken from a free public source or I bought the book that goes with it. If you use these lessons, please purchase the appropriate book where appropriate to support these rich and wonderful stories. In respect for these authors and illustrators, any artwork from the book itself has been removed from my lessons. Please note that links to research are provided in the Teacher Notes.

It was also for these lessons that I developed some of my original characters, particularly Leaula. If you use this artwork, please cite me appropriately. 

​Below you will find a brief intro to each story and then the lesson plans. If you should find any issues or have any questions, there is a place for you to contact me at the bottom of this page.