Six ‘how-to’ questions on teaching Latin and ancient Greek language at primary school

This chapter formulates an answer to six key questions regarding transformative Latin and ancient Greek teaching at primary school. It does so by exploring the design of the curriculum as well as individual lessons in the ‘Monsters in storytelling traditions’ course, one of the Young Heroes courses. By weighing up the pros and cons of various solutions to six didactic issues – from how to teach the ancient Greek alphabet and Latin or ancient Greek grammar, to approaching texts, incorporating pupils’ language repertoires, and building up linguistic knowledge without rote learning – the practicalities of a transformative classics pedagogy for primary school can be mapped onto ‘translanguaging’ practice. This is a current Modern Foreign Language approach which moves away from strict L1-to-L2 learning to focus on developing pupils’ entire linguistic repertoire.