I’m taking classes to earn my teaching certification for Latin, and one of the most helpful has been my Methods class. Our professor has tons of great ideas that I’ve been able to implement in my classroom – this is one of them.

My Methods professor introduced this activity to us as a foldable, but I’ve since narrowed it down to noun foldables, since these are difficult to make with verbs and other parts of speech. These are easy to make and require very little prep on your part, and they are great for vocabulary acquisition.

For these instructions, I’ll be using Cambridge Stage 4 (4th ed.) as a reference. Here’s how it works:

1. Assign each student a noun from the current stage. This is the only part of this activity that requires much labor on your part. I list all these nouns in a Google Sheet so I can type students’ names next to each noun. This can be tricky depending on your number of students. Since our class sizes are small, I rarely run out of nouns for students, but try these ideas:
   1. I use nouns first from the vocabulary list in each stage. In stage 4, this gives you 7 nouns (8 if you include “negotium” from “negotium agit”).
   2. Then I go through the stage and list any other nouns, glossed or otherwise. The stage 4 model sentences, for example, give you 3 nouns we haven’t seen before.
   3. I also use nouns from any outside stories we read, whether they are from the Cambridge Fabulae Ancillantes, the Minimus series, stories on Tarheel Reader, etc.
   4. Use culture-related nouns. The Stage 4 culture reading includes lares and duoviri, for example. You could also use mythological or historical figures if they are part of your curriculum.
   5. Finally, depending on whether or not we have done foldables for previous stages, I would pull in vocabulary from old stages. If you have done foldables for old stages, pull them out and let students add on to them (to their own or someone else’s).
2. Students fold their papers so that there is a diamond in the middle. We use colored paper, but notebook, construction, or plain computer paper works fine too. Have them fold their papers horizontally (hamburger), then horizontally (hamburger) again. Then they should fold down the inside corner so that there is a folded-over triangle – my students call this the Google Docs logo. Open it up, and you should have four squares with a diamond in the middle.
3. Students write their noun inside the diamond on the sheet: Latin word on top, English word on bottom. Establish the most important rule of the noun foldable, which is: The vocabulary word, whether in English or in Latin, can only appear inside the diamond.
4. Students label the boxes.
   1. Top left: Illustration (pictura)
   2. Top right: Description (depictio… if you have a better idea for what to call this, please let me know)
   3. Bottom left: Examples (exempla)
   4. Bottom right: It’s not… (non est…)
5. Then students fill in the boxes. They are pretty self-explanatory, but you will probably have to explain them a time or two. 🙂
   1. pictura: Draw a picture of the noun. Stick figures OK!
   2. depictio: This is usually the hardest for students. The description should come from the stories and from their brain. Depending on the student, you can do some scaffolding here. There are three general “levels” of depictiones…
      1. Just writing an adjective.
      2. Writing a sentence from the story with a blank where the word should be. (Example: for canis, writing “____ est in via.”)
      3. Writing a complete sentence without using the word in the diamond. “est in via,” “dormit in via,” “latrat et salit,” “est pestis,” etc.
   3. exempla: Their chief examples should be from the book/story, but they are welcome to incorporate outside “sources” too. For “mater,” e.g., students would write “Metella,” “Iulia” (mom in the Minimus story), “Mella” (mom in the Gilbo stories on Tarheel Reader), and on and on. They could also write the names of famous mothers. At our Catholic school, for example, “Mary” would be an example used by many students – but “Mother Teresa” couldn’t be, since it uses the word “mother.”
   4. non est…: These are non-examples using vocabulary that students already know. There are a few ways to do this:
      1. Words in the same category. For pavo, for example, a student might list canis, mus, equus, etc. as non-examples, since they’re all animals.
      2. Words that are easily confused. For mus, I’d definitely put murus. Same with liber, libertus, etc.
      3. Words that are the opposite. puer for puella, pater for mater, etc.
      4. If all else fails, words that start with the same letter. This is a last resort, but undoubtedly you will run into something for which you use this option.

So what do you do with these when done?

Speed dating! Line students up into two lines facing each other. Students fold their foldables so only one panel is showing. They then try to guess what the person facing them has. The first time I did this, I was really surprised by how many of my students enjoyed it and didn’t immediately give up if they couldn’t tell what they were looking at; they asked their partner for another panel, then another, then another. Most of them get it this way, and since students become “experts” on the noun they worked on, they can coach their classmates through figuring out the answer. After 30 seconds-1 minute, I have students rotate. It’s a great review game.

Finally: save these! Save all of them, even the ones that aren’t great. Put a Post-it note on those or put them in an extra file to be re-done. You will want these later on to have a quick sponge activity, and those “not-great” ones become great resources when you are short on nouns in a later stage and need a word for a student to work on. You can also go back and add on to old foldables – this is a great activity for early finishers.