Centaur Verb Presentations
by Ruth L. Breindel, Moses Brown School, Providence, RI
Original text © 2005 Ruth L. Breindel
PowerPoint Presentation
I begin with a basic PowerPoint slide show. Most of us can make something like this: a simple group of slides that come in at various times. The first slide was just the drawing of the long and winding road (pace Paul McCartney); the various centaurs, from the standard clip art package, were added along with the words. The centaur in the pluperfect, who is the first to come on, is sized smaller than the next, which is larger still, until the present is the largest; after that, they get smaller as you move to the future and the future perfect (my favorite, unreal, tense).
I used color for the tenses, trying to keep in the blue/red range. However, the future perfect tense never looked good in that spectrum, so I moved to an orange. It’s not the best, but it certainly shows how different that tense is.
Each tense is presented with the Latin sentence, then the name of the tense and a time marker (Pluperfect – 2 weeks ago) and the English translation.
You can show this slide on a projector or have the student huddle around the computer in your room, if you have one.
Learning Style: good for the “non-linear” learner. The action helps those students who need something to keep them alert – the kinetic learner. Good for visual students.
