What exactly is a Pictatio? A Pictatio is similar to a Dictatio but instead of writing down sentence, students are drawing pictures on whiteboards. I have done dictatio exercises with my students many times, and they are great prereading exercises. Much like Keith Toda, I learned how to do a Dictatio at Pedagogy Rusticatio.
How I Switched up the Dictatio
I decided to try out this activity as a prereading exercise to shake up class and try something different. Unlike the Drawing Dictation, I read an entire paragraph of a story to students three times. Students had to listen carefully the first two times I read the story without drawing or writing in Latin. Students then drew details from the paragraph that I read. To help aid student comprehension, I drew three pictures on the whiteboard of new vocabulary that the students would see in the story (gladius, arcus, sagitta, and nauta).
I stressed to my students that some of them might get slightly different details from the same paragraph. And some of them did. However, as a teacher, it was immensely useful to see which students didn’t catch which details. For example, many of my students had forgotten the word stola from our earlier clothing unit. So, when they left out Achilles wearing a stola, then I knew they had missed an important detail. If students left out the pretty girls on the island, then I knew they had missed that detail. It was immediate feedback to me on their listening comprehension, which was fantastic!
After giving students time to draw, I revealed the paragraph of the story to them. I also then took whiteboards and narrated the pictures to the students. Students almost always love it when I chose their whiteboard to narrate to the class! I tried to choose whiteboards that captured the majority of the story or two whiteboards that captured two different but important details in the story.
When, I asked my students what they thought about this activity, it seemed to be a rather universal success in all my classes. I was also pleasantly surprised by how well my students did on this listening activity. It was a challenge for them as we’ve moved to reading stories in the past tense, but they were quite successful with it! The story took most of a class period to complete.
Our students are in their second year of Latin and have transitioned this semester from the present tense to “living in the past tense,” as I’ve told them. They’ve had about a month of exposure to the past tense at this point, and I am trying to be particularly mindful about using verbs that look somewhat like their present tense form, glossing or introducing other forms as discrete vocabulary, and focusing a little more on adding nouns, adverbs, and prepositions instead of new verbs.
How to Do a Pictatio
- Identify a story (or part of a story) that you want to read with your students. I recommend that it has a lot of vocabulary the students are familiar with. It’s also better if the syntax is a little less complicated.
- Draw as many new vocabulary words in the story on the board so students can see it during the activity.
- All students should have whiteboards and markers. It’s harder to share and describe pictures on notebook paper.
- Create a PowerPoint or Google Slides version of your story. If you’d like to see the version that I did with my own students, here is the first part of the story Achilles Gerens Stola as a Pictatio.
- Read the paragraphs of the story to your students three times. If you have a lot of dialogue in your story, chunk it together in a natural paragraph-ish group.
- Students may not draw during the first two times. They must only listen. After the second time, students can begin drawing or keep listening.
- Reveal the paragraph to the students, and take two whiteboards to narrate the pictures.
- Allow students to ask questions in English before moving onto the next paragraph.
- Follow-up the exercise with another reading activity. We chose to do traditional reading comprehension questions.
If you try this activity out, let me know how it worked for you! Our kiddos loved it! If you want to read the complete Achilles Gerens Stolam story, stay tuned! I’ll post it soon!
