Lesson 10: Food for thought... and for eating

"Please don't tell me my existence is meaningless!"

After a quick entree of Latin verbs, we got down to more important matters i.e. solving the mysteries of the universe (with a little help from Aristotle). Recalling our previous lesson (how we use memory and experience to make sense of the world), we explored how Aristotle disagreed with his teacher Plato about how we perceive reality. In Aristotle's world, it's all about experience, and not about some mystical, pre-existing 'ideas' or 'forms'. "Ask questions!" Aristotle urges us. "Ask what things are made of! Ask how they got here! And most importantly, ask WHY they exist!" Cue an epic class debate on the nature of the universe (which Devon has 100% figured out, apparently, but which the rest of us are still struggling with). Anyhow, your "What's The Point Of Flies And Spaghetti Bolognese?" worksheets should make for some interesting dinner conversations this weekend...

Enough of food for thought, let's have some real food for eating. We started the second

Sorry, Romans, not for you

half of our lesson with a quiz to see just what a Roman might have had in his or her kitchen cupboard. No jacket potatoes, popcorn or ketchup for these guys, as all these ingredients were native to South America, a land unknown to the Romans. No sugar either. They had to sweeten their food with fruit juices, fruit syrups and honey. Which we then tasted, along with authentic Roman bread (not to everyone's taste, but Daniel couldn't get enough!), pomegranate, dates and a fresh cheese. On the way out of the lesson, more dates and a recipe sheet of authentic Roman recipes translated from the original Latin of Apicius. Enjoy!

Lesson 9: Bants!

Lego actually means 'I read' in Latin!

Bants about the imperfect

We're back (finally!) after half-term and INSET, starting with a quick game of Wood Roots Challenge (score = 18), and refreshing our memories about Latin verbs. With boards and markers, we played Quick Fire Verbs, looking at the beginning of the verb to see what is happening, and the end to see who is doing it. If you ever liked Lego (I still do!), you'll love Latin. The two are really similar: just use different 'bricks' (word stems, word endings) to change grammatical information (e.g.person, number, subject/object). Today we learned about a new set of 'bricks' - endings that show the imperfect (the Tense Formerly Known As Past Continuous Or Past Progressive), which translates as 'was .....ing'. 'Imperfectus' in Latin actually means 'incomplete', giving you an idea of the action of the verb being ongoing rather than done and dusted. So, after a verbal run-through of the endings, we played a game of Imperfect Quick Fire Verbs before settling down to an exercise sorting and translating verbs in this tense.

Elephant? Sofa? Sofa made out of an elephant?

Next, a brain-break... or was it? In a visual quiz, we looked at close-ups of objects and tried to work out what the object was. Fun, sure, but what on earth did this have to do with Classics (an excellent question asked by one of the class!)? Well, in working out whether that blue scaly stuff was from a snake, a dragon or a shoe, and in assessing if the brown wrinkly material was a leather sofa or an elephant, we all had to do the same thing: go back into our memories and search through our life experiences. Next week, we'll look at how the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle came up with the idea (radical for its time) that all of our knowledge is based on experience.