Find the Sentence: Little to no prep way to create reading reps to review a passage.

I first found find the sentence at todallycomprehenisble as I often do with comprehension based activities.  Magister Toda involves some prep work to create a find the sentence version with illustrations from a text.  Illustrations are a fantastic way to help students connect to text.  If you have time to make images with a text follow Keith’s plan.  Another easy way to have images would be to do some sort of read and draw activity with students’ first approach of a text.  Then your prep becomes a class activity, collecting images and choosing some that you think solicit thought about parts of the passage.  Read and Draw activities can be completed in many ways:

• Read, Discuss and Draw – You read a section of the story, ask questions in the target language (circle or PQA as needed) and have students draw the scene.  This takes a long time and students will end up drawing 4-8 scenes depending on the passage.  You may also have students draw part of the discussion.
• 1 – 2 – 3 – Draw – is a great way for students to produce some input based output.  Students draw a scene, they place 2 thought or speech bubbles within the scene.  I often suggest that students make a scene with multiple characters for this.  Students then caption the scene with the 3 most relevant sentences from the story.  Sometimes many students will draw the same scene.  I like to use this one for longer passages or multiple connected passages.
• Comic Strip Draw and Read – Students simply choose scenes to draw while the teacher reads the passage.  Often I have students caption each scene with the most relevant sentence from the passage.

The above examples of read and draw are a powerful activity for you.  1st, you can roam around the room and get an idea to what part of the passage students are connecting.  You can use this information to complete comprehension checks on other parts.  2nd you can create PQA based on what students are drawing.  If you struggle with oral input as a Latin teacher, read and draw activities offer a low key way to talk about something that is student generated but many times will stay in bounds and be comfortable.  You can always use the phrasing in the text.  3rd, they give you images to use another day in review with activities such as find the sentence.   A read and draw activity can easily create 4-5 days of planned input.  It can also expand to quick quizzes or language tasks.

But there are other simple ways to use find the sentence if drawing isn’t up your alley.  Here are some ideas, but basically anything that involves student interpreting something and choosing the correct sentence will work.

• Pick 8-10 sentence and pair students or put them in groups of 3 for a larger class.  Give students a sentence from the passage.  Each pair or group is to create a 30 second mime to express the sentence.  Each group performs and other groups guess the sentence.  This can be done in the moment verbally or students can write down a sentence for each group and you can review afterward.
• Pick 8-10 sentences from the story and cut them into strips.  Make a set for however many groups you will have for a relay race.  I like to keep it around 5 as larger tends to become to congested.  Put each set of sentences into a container.  Write a new Latin sentence that is a summary of the idea.  Make the summaries shorter and more simple.  Read the summary sentence and 1 student from each team is to run to the team’s container and find the correct sentence.  1st to find it wins the round.  Or, have students bring them back to the group and put the sentences in order as they get new sentences.  Obviously you would read them in a shuffled order.
• Use Magister P’s kahoot quadrant.  Choose 8-10 sentences from the passage and translate them into English.  Split the story up into clear sections that use 1 of the sentences.  Put 4 translations into 1 Kahoot question in the order you will read the passage.  It is important that only 1 translation occurs per section that you read.  Read the section of the passage and students pick the correct translation out of 4 that they hear in the passage.  This works better for longer passages or even a chapter of a larger work.

Lastly, look for opportunities to ask students for their interpretation when it arises.  For example, do all groups agree of how a group performs a mime scene for a certain passage?  If not, play agree/disagree and and add in a bunch of reps with words like puto, existimo or other thinking or evaluating types of words.  Sometimes image ilicit multiple responses.  Have students pick a sentence to go with an image and pick the most important Latin words to prove their position.

What ideas do you have to add to find the sentence?  Don’t be shy and leave them in the comments.  Check out my page of comprehensible input activities for more ideas.