Is Marina around?

[RosaIsRed]

How is it going with Latin Club, Marina. Have you done the plaster of paris seals yet? We did them today, it was interesting, to say the least. But we had fun.

We tend not to get access to the art cupboard and I should be more inventive with the crafty stuff, it's my Achilles heel. That sounds great!
But Our Favourite Characters drawings are on lavish display by the school gate
Ds has done a bottle-brush-tailed Vibrissa and we have Flavius re-imagined as Homer Simpson by one of our more original members
I cannot get over how well the term has gone. For them and me Am now being asked if I can persuade another parent to open up a second, beginners' group next year
How's it going generally for you Rosa?

Message withdrawn

I brought in the plaster of paris myself and mixed it up in the classroom we use (I did warn the teacher first). It set hard really quickly. I have bought some dip pens so they can practise writing a letter Roman-style next week.
It is going really well, the children are having fun and I am going to give them certificates next week when we complete Lesson Four - three of them have volunteered to do a speech in Latin in assembly and translate it, so that the school can see what they have been learning - they are going to bring in the letters and seals too.
The pictures sound great. I got them to improvise a play last week with each of them playing a Roman slave and that was really good fun.
I am not sure what to do next year. The club is a mix of Years Five and Six - so next year I will have a few who have already done it and a new intake as well and I am not sure how to manage that.

Best of luck with the assembly! I bet they'll be so chuffed with their certificates.
Mine are almost all 4s and 5s so am quite lucky, we are just carrying on next year with the same group.

We are victims of our own success though - loads of this year's Yr3s have asked to join, and there is still a waiting list in this year's Yr4s. And as I work f/t there simply isn't another time in the week when I can offer the school a second class

We are celebrating end of term tomorrow with the excellent Fling the Teacher Roman Britain quiz recommended on the Minimus website, and chocolate eggs.

Ds is now doing Minimus, it's being offered as a lunchtime club at his primary school (Y4). He's very taken with it, and thinks he's great at it! I think all the soldier-y content is a great draw for him, as well as the fact that they have 6th form boys from the local public school helping out with the club. [small boy hero-worship emoticon]

It's a fantastic thing to do, for kids who otherwise wouldn't get the chance to do Latin.

Frogs, I nearly popped with happiness when my sole Yr6 told me he intended to keep his Latin on at secondary school "now he knew how great it was".
I agree, the content of Minimus is incredibly well suited to boys. My lot either carry on like Rufus (infans, sigh) or want to be Flavius.

Unless I am much mistaken your LEA is making an exemplary commitment to Minimus and offering it as widely as possible?

No such luck, Marina, it's being done on a voluntary basis by a particularly motivated parent of one of ds's classmates. Which is lovely, but does rather depend on the school having access to parents with a classics education.

It's a funny school actually very very socially mixed (Catholic), but with a sizeable minority of parents who use it as a free prep school for the local boys' independents. Which in turn is less good for social cohesion, but means that these sort of opportunities can be offered. I don't know how representative the minimus uptake is of the school population as a whole I must ask the parent who runs it. But I guess since there is some sitting still, reading and concentrating involved, there's always going to be an element of self-selection among the uptake. Hard to see a way round that, really, without making it compulsory, which in turn would probably reduce the appeal.

Hmm.

When they role played slaves last week I talked to them about the different jobs a slave might have done and then they wrote a description of their lives and read it out to the group. Strangely, all the girls chose to be hairdressers or cooks, while all the boys decided to be gladiators and reenacted a scene from the arena, using rulers as swords. I was a bit worried about what impression the head might have got if he had walked in at that point. But they put a lot of work into researching the different types of gladiators and what their lives were like.

Snap! We were doing, Who had the nicer life, Corinthus or Candidus? Captured slave with harsh life behind him, or born into captivity slave?
How might Pandora have felt on arriving at the villa?
Did Flavius and Lepidina look after their slaves...why? (Several people thought that as the slaves might get their own back big-time at Saturnalia it was in their best interests!)