Build-A-Scene: A Visual Vocabulary Activity for Learning Latin.
Like Build-A-Bear, but better because it’s vocabulary learning that doesn’t feel like vocabulary learning.
It can be a nice change to bring visual vocabulary activities into your Latin learning, especially with the kind of eccentric words on offer in your average word list (compared to our friends over at MFL). We have used variations of this activity to help our students — and ourselves — learn vocabulary and the idea is to grow a vivid scene out of one, initial word.
For today’s example, we will use John Taylor’s list of 250 common words for verse unseens (Latin Beyond GCSE) to build a scene.
- Choose a Latin word from the list and draw something that reflects it.
2. Add the Latin and English definition(s) in full.
3. Skim vocabulary list for words that are related to your first word. Add them to your scene. E.g. “fletus, us m. — tears” or “manes, manium m. — spirits of the dead” here.
4. Flesh out your scene by creating an environment (e.g. add weather, gods, expressions or objects that interact). If there’s more than one Latin word for something you’ve drawn, add them too!
Here’s our end result from starting with fleo, flere, flevi, fletum — I weep, cry, mourn:
Sometimes, scenes can turn out quite unexpectedly from where you started. See video below for a scene built upon stupeo:
Some variations of this activity you could also try are:
- Create a scene that is set…. “in Rome” “in the woods” “at sea”
- Create a scene on the theme of…. “love” “death” “revenge” “marriage”
- Summarise [insert passage, story, text] in one scene + annotate with as many words as you can.
Enjoy!
