Classics

It has been wonderful to see incredible levels of engagement across senior year groups as they further their knowledge of Latin grammar. There may be people out there who question, “why learn Latin?”. Latin provides a key to the Romance languages, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese etc. Latin is the universal language of western civilization. Actually, Latin provides the blueprint for any language we may be learning later in life: German, Russian, Chinese, or any other one. You might be forgiven for thinking that the learning of complex grammatical points would be quite “dry” - perhaps your own memories of learning Latin, if you did so at School, have led to this impression. For those that think that, you just need to step inside the Latin classroom and Beechwood and sit in one of Mrs Anderson’s lessons to realise that “dry” is not what lessons are like! At Beechwood, Latin is distinctly different, with ingenious and engaging methods being used to illustrate the finer grammatical points on a daily basis. For example, 6A have been getting to grips with the imperfect tense (i.e. ‘was/were’ + ‘-ing). In Latin, verb endings in this tense all start with the letters “-ba” as follows: -bam I -bamus we -bas you (singular) -batis you (plural) -bat he/she/it -bant they So how do Year 6 pupils remember this? Mrs Anderson has them all chanting “ba ba ba for the pa pa past” This then developed into a variety of “designer sheep” to help the pupils to remember this important grammatical point - some brilliant examples below, and more here:

Mrs Anderson is now safe in the knowledge that they ALL remember their imperfect verb endings now!

Every bit as creative, 7A have been creating comic strips to aid their study of the imperative; Mrs Anderson has been so impressed not only with their creativity but also their exemplary use of the plurals imperative forms and the accusative case, with special mention to Matthew F for his fabulous retelling of the Trojan vs Greeks war in Latin! Latin is far from being at “dead” language at Beechwood...