What did Romans eat for dinner? How did Roman dinners differ depending on socioeconomic status? To follow the readings and activities for Romanum Prandium and Romanum Ientaculum, we introduced some common dinner vocabulary to teach about the Romana Cena. We aren’t teaching synchronous classes to our students, so we created videos and short readings for our students to allow for repetition of the vocabulary. We introduced the students to the list of vocabulary. Students watched a short video on Cena Coreana and read about the cena Magistri Smith. Students also watched my husband’s video (with outtakes) and read his story. I also made a video about dinner, with outtakes, and…

What did the Romans eat for lunch? To follow our discussion of Romanum Ientaculum, we introduced students to common lunch-related vocabulary and taught about the Romanum Prandium. We aren’t teaching synchronous classes to our students, so we created videos and short readings for our students to allow for repetition of the vocabulary. There are four of us in our upper schools, so we each had a hand in creating the reading and listening materials. We introduced the lesson with a video aimed at our novice students, which included the food labeled with post-its. If you’re looking for a harder video, there’s also a Coquamus video with some of this same…

Like every other teacher, we have also changed our expectations to match the realities of a pandemic and virtual teaching at our school. We had been preparing as a department to teach Via Periculosa with our students. We ultimately decided to scrap reading it online with the hope that we would be able to better teach it in the fall–whatever that may look like. The solution we came up with was to talk about travel, which would have been our segway into Via Periculosa, and food. Let’s start by talking about the Romanum Ientaculum, the Roman breakfast.