Learning Classics is a bit like putting on a magic pair of 3-D glasses. Once you start delving into the language and the culture, you'll start to see it all around you. This blog is a record of the club's journey through the worlds and language of ancient Rome and Greece... and through modern times, too, searching for the influence of classics all around us. You'll also be able to find vocab, home tasks, links and generally enlightening info here, too.
18 October 2015
Lesson 4 - Creature creations
We opened with a fun exploration of how ancient languages often blended word parts to make compound words, especially for mythological characters (Mino-taur, uni-corn, hippo-gryph), and we noted how this still happens today (labrad-oodle, beef-alo, ze-donk). We each got a word-part card and as a class tried to make some well-known compound words. We got a bit stuck on cephalo and pod, but knowing the meanings of these words in Greek, we could work out that a head-foot creature might be something like a snail. Then the really fun bit: mixing up the word cards to make new compound creatures of our own. Here's a selection...
Shantay's cephalosaur
Angel's dinodactyl
Oliwia's dinopod
Andrei's pterolyc
Jagoda's pusanthrope
After all that creativity, we settled down to our language work, and to ponder subject and object nouns. In English, meaning is defined by the order in which nouns come in the sentence, but we all know now that Latin conveys meaning through word ending. As many students correctly guessed, we have to look at the ending of nouns to see which one is doing the action and which one is receiving the action. Silence descended on the class as we tackled a worksheet full of nominative (subject) and accusative (object) endings, and all that could be heard was the ticking of brains!...
And finally, for any of you who enjoyed that rap at the beginning of the class, here it is:
