I’m going to be talking as if we are starting from the very beginning, as if we are preparing to teach a 6th-grade Latin I course. I’ll begin by laying out the progression of the natural method: listening, speaking, and then reading. We append reading to the end of the series of events because it is, in practice, the most difficult task of the three. If we can give students plentiful examples of the kinds of things that they are going to be reading before they encounter them in a text, it will make the reading process much more fluid. When they ask why ‘Quinti’ looks the way it does, rather than explaining grammar and cases, you can rely on previous experiences in which the student did understand the genitive case. You could respond: “It is just like calamus magistri”.

Intelligibility is the guiding principle in a classroom like this, and the more students understand, the more you can add to their repertoire. It is important to keep in mind that progress is going to feel slow, but students are learning much more than they appear to be if you are consistent in your maintenance of Latin only. In the beginning, your sentences should be as simple as possible and be of immediate interest to the students. Teaching them how to say hello, goodbye, what is your name, etc. is interesting enough because the students are the subjects of the instruction. The real challenge is finding what to teach when the novelty of hearing and understanding a foreign language begins to wear off.

Though intelligibility is the baseline that a teacher of this method must maintain, an interesting subject matter and a careful and animated delivery of that subject matter are just as important if you want to stand a chance at holding students’ attention for a meaningful amount of time. I have worked with eighth graders every year that I have been a teacher, and if I have learned anything, it is that if they do not have a reason to listen, they are not going to. Kids are not adults, as much as we want them to be. You have to give them something they perceive as worth listening to. Do you know what kids like? Humor, games competition, and an interesting story. Those sound like indulgences in a classroom, and I promise I am not advocating for some kind of clownish classroom debacle, but I am a strong believer in working with kids and not at them. Your class, as with school generally, should be a place where students want to go.

As great as Lingua Latina is, “Roma in Italia est” or “Albinus est mercator” are not exactly gripping story beats. However, students always seem to get a kick out of the tantrum that Lydia throws in chapter eight when Medus does not want to buy her a ring and when the medicus comes to help Quintus’ foot only to bleed his arm and then leave. If you have the Colloquia Personarum book, there are some pretty good chapters in there as well, like when Dorippa catches Lepidus kissing another girl after boasting of her man’s integrity and freedom to Lydia. 

These are helpful hooks, but they only come around in the story so often. The filler in between is important and helpful, but not immediately interesting. This is a tough cookie. I would say in order to avoid getting bogged down in some of the dryer parts of the story, ideally, we would want to move through them as quickly as possible. The perfect scenario is that the students are merely practicing things that they already know when they read the book, and not learning many new concepts that will choke progress.

You want to spend as much time as possible speaking and listening before going anywhere near the book. I would even say, push it off for years if you can. The longer you put it off, assuming you are spending the free time effectively, the easier the read will be, and the quicker they can get to those more amusing moments. So, the question becomes, how do we fill that time?