Latin

So, regardless of the rest of the subjects, Latin is my job to teach. We've been gamely using Latina Christiana. Because of my lack of, I dunno, competitive spirit, we've happily been chugging along at a snail's pace. He's got it just fine! We just seem to linger over a lesson for weeks and then go back and do review again at the first sign of a pause in action. Then we really *did* take the last two months of school off Latin. So we've been back at it for a few weeks and are, once again, doing review. I don't know WHY I make us go back and do the review. I haven't hit anything yet that he can't remember. But I do. Call it habit.

Shortly before the year began though, one of my favorite homeschool bad influences introduced me to The Cambridge Latin Course. Now, I think, I'm not sure, but I think CLC is really for kids at the first year of Hogwarts. 11-ish is what I'm saying. Nevertheless, it is so insanely well organized and written that as long as you *aren't* overly competitive and concerned with looking all advanced and what not -- or in other words -- are willing to dilly dally a bit, there's no reason to hold off. Well, I say that but Max is, after all, a fourth grader. If you're reading this and putting together your first grader's curriculum then I say NO. You don't need Latin. Come back in a few years. TRUST me that what you have is enough. But say your kid is nine or ten or eleven and Latina Christiana is not doing it for you, then I have to admit that the program is really nice. We are, three-ish weeks into the school year, still on the first lesson. But oh how we giggled our way through it at the library today. The "main character" of the first lesson -- because CLC is built around immersion stories with black and white drawings (like a comic book) -- is a dog. Somehow running through the vocabulary today (and there's plenty of it) we got to a discussion of the word "is sitting" and that led to deciding that maybe we should train Emily to follow her commands in LATIN. And that led to lots of gesturing and giggling. Anyway, there's tons of Roman history and culture built into the lessons complete with full-color photographs of ruins from Pompei. We're enjoying it very much. It's a little hard to get HOLD of if you order it on your own -- they'll basically run a security check to make sure you're not really a high-school student trying to get hold of the answer key. But everything but the teacher's manual is available easily through eBay. I've heard that the related activities on the website are pretty good, too: http://www.cambridgescp.com/latin/clc/clc_home.html



Oh, we're still doing Latina Christiana I. I guess just because it's not rocket science andwe seem to be fine doing both. But then, we're doing both Saxon 5/4 and Right Start Level E, just because they seem to solve each other's issues, and THAT is some honest-to-goodness work. So two Latin programs is cake.