Making Changes and Teaching Etymology

Today was the first day of a new semester for me. Being the second day, I decided it was time to change what I do just a bit and to try something different. I really appreciate the blogosphere and my fellow teachers who give sound advice, ideas, share knowledge, and provide feedback. It is in part because of my fellow teacher bloggers that I’m doing some things different this semester.

Last semester the big evil, I mean LAUSD, implemented a “new” curriculum for English Language Arts classes in high school.  Of course they did not say it is “mandatory” but rather a “suggested” curriculum.  To be honest, I like most of the curriculum.   The only problem is that the curriculum doesn’t always work. Throughout college they tell us, “Teach what you love. Teach what you know. Just make sure you incorporate the standards”.  Part of the problem is that I simply could not stand the novel they chose for my ninth graders, “A Night to Remember”.  Ok, the Titanic is a great story, but the novel gives about 60 different perspectives of that horrible night.  Oh, yeah, the goal was to teach multiple perspectives; do ninth graders need 60 perspectives to get that concept?  Confession: I didn’t finish the book with the class. We used it for what we needed and were done with it.

What am I doing different? First, for the first two months, I am NOT using district curriculum. I haven’t been “trained” on the unit that should start the last two months so I haven’t decided if I’ll do my own thing or the district’s. What I AM going to do though assign a theme/skill for each day of the week. Mondays will be for grammar instruction and perhaps some light reading or writing.  Tuesdays and Wednesdays will be days to teach content specific skills or to supplement Literature Circles. Thursdays are vocabulary tests and new vocabulary words. Fridays are Literature Circles.  Just this alone feels more manageable.  Since today is Thursday, I started up with vocabulary lessons again.  Suprisingly, it went much better than expected.

Today we learned about Etymology.  Let me say now that I have never studied etymology in isolation.  It’s something I’m still learning.  I did some research online about teaching etymology and I asked a couple teachers. Combining some ideas this is what I came up with.

First, I wrote LANGUAGES on the board and had the kids popcorn out all the languages they could think of.  Of course, almost all my classes did not think of Latin or Greek. So I asked them, “What two ancient languages are missing from our list?”.  They finally got them. I then briefly talked about how many languages are based on the Latin and Greek forms of words. 

Next I wrote ETYMOLOGY on the board. I broke down the meaning of and root of ETYM and of OLOGY. We then came up with the meaning of the combined roots.  The kids were kind of into this. They began to see how you can figure words out, like a puzzle, if you just have a few tools.

For practice we did two more of these on the board. HIPPOPOTAMUS and MALARIA.  These were fun. Malaria worked well since many of my students speak Spanish. They were able to guess what MAL meant and they figured out ARIA with my hints at what it sounded like. They then thought it was cool that it literally means Bad Air.  By this time they were asking me about other words and were having fun. Amazing I know!

The next step was to give them their new vocabulary words.  Three classes got 5 roots and 5 literary terms. My tenth graders and ninth grade honors got 10 roots for this week.  I then orate each word, say it’s meaning, and have kids popcorn out examples of words with those roots.  Their homework tonight was easy. Find three words for each root and then use one of those three words to write a sentence. 

The final little project that is more for fun and will make my room look nice for Parent Night   is name etymology.  Each student either used a computer in class or will do it at home. They will go to BEHINDTHENAME.COM and THINKBABYNAMES.COM to research their name. They have to find the origin, the meaning, and a story about their name. Over the weekend they will make a creative piece that includes these elements. I modeled this with my own name: Tamara, from Tamar, Hebrew, Means date or fruit from a palm tree, biblical woman in the Old Testament. The kids LOVE looking up stuff about themselves so that was a fun way to start the week and overall I would have to call it successful; even with the kids who seemed to have gotten a stocking full of crack for Christmas. Yes, they are a bit spastic.