Some time ago, I made one of these “Dollhouse Books” as a way of learning the technique. My drawing skills were not good enough to draw a house at the time, and I settled for an abstract book based on the four elements of terra, aqua, aer, and ignis. It didn’t make much progress.
But I’ve recently made contact with another Latin teacher through Tumblr, whose ideas about teaching students to draw and memorize Latin vocabulary roughly parallel my own. And it occurred to me that he(they? she?) might find the Dollhouse Book useful. So I made up a diagram and posted it to my Tumblr account to give him the tools and explain how it could be used. But he’s probably not the only person who might benefit from it. Using paper to teach engineering, bookbinding, foreign languages, anything, really, strikes me as a good use for wood pulp. These things become long-term teaching tools if they’re properly treated and respected, and they’ll likely become keepsakes or heirlooms of families long after the kids themselves are ‘done’ learning Latin.
It’s worth a shot, and it brings some much-needed creativity into the Latin (or any foreign language) classroom.
