Greek

Thursday, September 17 – Today was the first day of the new Greek Club for this school year. This year I will be the only teacher in the Greek Club and while I will have some assistance from Mr. Arcenas who has much knowledge of the ancient Greek language and culture, for the most part I will running the club by myself. This will definitely be a challenge this year in terms of being organized and being able to come up with activities each week for the club. At the first Greek meeting today I was pleased to see that not only had the majority of Greek students from the previous year returned, but there were many new additions to the Greek Club from a variety of different grades. We did not do any Greek today but rather I stood at the front of the class and explained the Greek Club in terms of our goals and the different areas of the Greek language we would be studying.

Thursday, September 24 – Today was the first real learning day of the new Greek Club. I decided that eventually I would break the students up into older Greek students and newer Greek students so they could each work at their own levels. However for the first few classes I decided to do a review of the material we had covered from the beginning so that the older students could remember what they were doing while the newer students were learning. So we began by looking over the Greek alphabet and I went through and talked about each of the letters and explained their importance and their frequency in the Greek language and how to properly pronounce them. I told my students to take the alphabet home and practice and that next week we would try pronunciation next week with different words.

Thursday, October 1 – Today in Greek we spent the class working on pronunciation of Greek words. I started by allowing everyone to use their alphabets with the pronunciation tips. With the tips the students did very well. Though they would always struggle at first when I gave them a word, in the end they could pronounce the words very well. As we went through each word I explained the meaning of the word and made connections to the word in English and Latin. I then told the students to put their keys away and try pronouncing from memory of what the letters sounded like. They had a lot of trouble in the beginning but by the end of the class they were doing very well pronouncing from memory. At the end of class I awarded my Student of the Month Prize to my youngest student who was the only one to go out and buy a copy of the Athenaze Greek book we use in class. I bought her a drink and a snack as her prize.

Thursday, October 8 – Today we had a new member join the Greek Club and se is our first Freshman which I am very happy about because I feel that one of my responsibilities as leader of the club is to make sure it does not die after I leave next year and the more young students I can get to join the more likely it is the club will live on after me. So I started this class by beginning to teach the other students about the first declension in Greek how closely it connected to the first declension in Latin. The students did very well and learned the declension in no time so I had them work together to practice writing it out with different words while I took the new student aside and taught her about the Greek alphabet and all the things she had missed.

Thursday, October 15 – I could not come to Greek today because I had an interview at Smith College and I had to leave Mr. Arcenas in charge. However , I did not leave him with nothing. I gave Mr. Arcenas a passage from the Athenaze book to give to the students to translate and I told him to tell them to work together on the passage and help each other out. I also gave him explicit instructions on teaching the new Greek student the first declension and giving her some words to work with to practice her pronunciation.