From an ongoing series of posters I am designing for my classroom(s), here are the alphabet posters I’ve made. There are two, one with the sign language signs for all of the letters, and one with words that begin with each letter of the alphabet.
I definitely use this sign language poster when I teach my intro level students about Latin pronunciation during the first weeks of school. Here are some activities that I tried this year:
- We learn the sign and the Latin pronunciation of each letter together.
- We also learn classroom Latin in the first weeks of school. While we practice the pronunciation of classroom words, I also ask them “Quomodo scribitur?” and we spell words out with the Latin pronunciation of the letters and the sign language signs. My hope is that this might help kids begin to make phonetic connections between Latin letters and sounds.
- We also sing the “alphabet song” in Latin (printed on the poster) and sign simultaneously.
- For homework this year, I recorded a video on VoiceThread so that kids could watch me doing the signs and practice their alphabets along with me. I then asked them to record a video response including sounds/signs, so I could see how they were progressing.
One reason why I like this activity is that I think it caters to a variety of learning styles. I also have hope that, as I learn to incorporate Evan Gardner’s Where Are Your Keys? method into my teaching more, learning the sign language alphabet at the beginning of the year might set the tone for using sign language more often as the class continues.
(This year, my sixth graders seemed to really enjoy this activity. The first day that I was teaching them the alphabet we had a fire drill in the middle of class. At our school the rule is absolute silence during the entirety of the fire drill, which can sometimes be tough to enforce. On this occasion however, I didn’t have to shush anyone because we kept practicing our letters for the entire fire drill. Delightful!)
The second alphabet poster is blatantly stolen from a delightful book by Peter Sipes and illustrated by Jessica Rojas, which is generously published under a Creative Commons license. I updated the additional words to include some that the students would see as a part of their studies (or just words that I like/find interesting).
I haven’t really used this poster in direct instruction, but have hung it in the classroom in the hope that students might get interested in some of the words and ask about them. This hasn’t really happened yet, but…a girl can dream, can’t she? The Abecedarium Latinum book is available for free download here and for purchase here. Peter Sipes has published some suggestions for using the book as well.
As for printing the posters, I use shortrunposters.com. I design the posters to fit the 18″ x 24″ poster size, which costs only about $3 to print.
I have more posters that I hope to post here, but for now the full-sized versions of these posters are downloadable on Scribd.
ratiocinatio 