The Lesson in Detail

Usually I am up well before Fred because usually I get up somewhere between 6:30 and 7:30. This morning I woke about 9 am to discover Fred was up and had the coffee made!  Well, I was tired last night and I got up about 4 am to go to the bathroom. This is unusual for me because I don’t drink after about 6 pm. But last night I had potato chips and onion dip for supper. Fred was all ready to cook but I really didn’t feel up to eating a meal so the chips were fine. However, I was thirsty at bed time and drank a glass of water knowing full well what would happen during the night! Anyway, when I came back to bed, I read for about 30 minutes before turning off the light and going back to sleep.
Ok, the lesson. I had been told I could have the fourth grade from 1 pm until 1:45 and that is what I had planned for. but once I got there, amidst many apologies, Sarah {the teacher} told me that she had to take 5 to 10  minutes off the lesson time because at 2:45 the kids were going wherever they go for assemblies and she wanted to be sure they all had time to go to the bathroom. I thought to myself that fourth-graders must go to the bathroom much more quickly than seventh graders because there was no way that my seventh graders could do this is five minutes! However, then I realized that routinely, I had around thirty seventh graders whereas she had fourteen!

The class was expecting me and the children were pleased to see me.  I began by writing "Mi chiamo Patrizia" {My name is Patricia} on the board and saying it even though I knew they knew who I was. I used this to be sure that they remembered that in Italian, "ch" is pronounced as the sound of "K" in the word "key." I then told them that in Italian, pretty well every letter was pronounced. If the letter was there, it was said. As an example, I wrote the word "due" on the board and asked them how it was said in English. Of course, they knew how it was pronounced. I then told them that in Italian, it was pronounced as "do-ay" and that it was the word for the number two. Which led us neatly into the lesson.

The handout I gave them had the words for the numbers one through ten so we spent about five minutes on saying these. I said them; they repeated them. The boys said them; the girls repeated them.  The girls said them; the boys repeated them. We said them all together with a clap after each word. If it had been my class, we would have walked aound the room saying them, and clapping after each one because when I was teaching, I found that my seventh graders learned the required memorization of auxiliary verbs very quickly if I got them up out of their seats and chanting, walking and clapping and/or snapping their fingers at the same time. However, I didn’t feel comfortable doing this with someone else’s class. The next step with this fourth grade  was to work on the numbers 11 through 20.

I told them that eleven was a combination of the Italian words for one and ten and asked them to make a guess. Of course, as I expected them to, they wrote {on scratch paper}  "unodieci." I then put the actual word "undici" on the board and asked them first to tell me what letters had gone and then why did they think the word had changed. This led into a discussion of  living languages and how they changed as they were spoken. Then a girl asked me if twelve had changed from "due" plus "dieci." I was thrilled because I was going to tell them that and asked her if she would like to take a guess. She said, "dudici" and I told her that was a very smart guess and she was only off by one letter. Then, before I could ask anyone else to make a guess, a boy said "I bet it is dodici." I told him he was absolutely right ! As I told their teacher last time I was there, this class is a joy to teach and that reflected very positively on her teaching methods.  They were then told to figure out as a group the Italian words for thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and sixteen. There were four groups in the class so each group had one word.  As they were figured out, I put them on the board and they copied them onto their worksheets.

Next I told them about seventeen. This is where the numbers change from the pattern "ones plus ten" to "ten plus ones."  If I had had more time, I would have asked them to work it out for themselves, but as it was, I gave them "diciasette." I DID ask them to tell me how the spelling of the number for ten had changed. Next came 19 which is "diciotto." I put this on the board and I told them that the vowel "a" was dropped because "otto" began with a vowel and  this was a spelling rule in Italian. {And, like spelling rules in English, there are exceptions!} The word for twenty,  which is "venti" was on their sheet so I asked them to figure out the word for twenty-one.  Most of them wrote "ventiuno." But as I was putting what they thought it was on the board preparatory to correcting it, one boy said, "Wait a minute! Uno begins with a vowel!" I was thrilled as, from his dictation, I put "ventuno" on the board.. But the mistake I made at that point was thinking that the whole class had grasped the rule. In retrospect, I would have done better to have spent a little more time explaining and demonstrating  this with "otto", too.

 I gave each group two words to work out and as they were done and reported to me, put the correct spelling on the board. I also pointed out the when the word for three went to the end, It gained an accent to help with the pronunciation so "ventitrè"  was the correct spelling for twenty-three. The word for thirty was on their sheet so I told them to go ahead and do the best they could to figure out the numbers up to thirty.  When it came time to put up the word for twenty-eight, I had to remind them of the spelling rule for two vowels again.  Finally, I told them to go ahead and help each other construct the words from thirty-one to forty. I wrote them on the board so that as soon as they had finished, they could check the correctness of what they had written. I noticed as they were correctling, they needed to change the ones where they had forgotten to drop the vowel  before the numbers where they had to add  "uno" or "otto." Much to my surprise, most of them had remembered the accent at the end of the Italian word for three.

In the last ten minutes, I told them to look at the bottom of the sheet where the Italian phrase for "What time is ii?" {"Che ore sono?} was written. There was also a pattern phrase for the answer. This is "Sono le {put in the number}" As it happened, the teacher had a big clock on the board and I asked them to tell me the time {in italian} of the hours. I also gave them the words "mezzanotte" which is midnight and "mezzogiorno" which is noon. When I had thought I was going to have the extra 10 minutes, I had planned to go into time in more detail so the meaning of mezzo {half} was on the sheet. After I gave them mezzanotte and mezzogiorno, one boy said, "So, "notte" is night, right?  And "giorno" is day?" I told him that was an excellent guess and that he was quite correct. And that was a very nice positive note upon which to end the class.

Highlights of this lesson were as follows:

• these students have obviously been encouraged to make intelligent guesses.
• When they made mistakes, they responded very well to, "You are on the right lines but not quite there yet. Does someone what to take Christofero’ s reasoning a little further?"
• One student told me that she had moved here from North Carolina where they were learning Spanish in her school. She said the bit of Spanish she knew made this Italian very easy.
• Much to my surprise, one girl asked me why  the "mezzo-" part of mezzogiorno had an "o" whereas in "mezzanotte" there was an "a". I told her there was a good reason and that if she would tell me her full name, I would send her a note explaining it.  We didn’t actually have the time in class since at that point the students were on their way out to the bathroom!
• In case you are wondering, "giorno" is a masculine noun and in italian, adjectives have to agree in gender with their nouns. "Mezzo" is masculine and "mezza" is feminine. Which means of course, that "notte" is feminine! I will break this down into simple steps in my letter to her.
• Because I gave them the Italian words for fifty through a hundred,  and constructed "centosettantotto" {178} on the board for them, some of the kids were constructing longer numbers like "centoventidue" {122} and even "trecentoquarantasette" 347} on their own! They loved the idea that it was written in one long word.

Ok, you have got this in such detail because this entry is the basis of my five-page paper in which I have to first, tell what I did, and secondly, reflect on it!

QUOTATION: If your ship doesn’t come in, swim out to it!

Jonathan Winters

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