I think I'll skip actually wading into the origins debate today, but I do want to clarify this important theological issue which has been vexing believers for ages. It is not the case that God would be 'non-deterministic' by definition. It is precisely the problem that God by definition would have to preside over a deterministic universe, because the following are considered absolutely necessary to the definition of God in the sense used by the three Abrahamic traditions: 1) God is all-powerful 2) God is all-knowing 3) God is the prime mover who set all things into motion If God set the world into motion, then what happens is a result of his actions. If he's all-knowing, he knew what those results would be. If he's all-powerful, he could have made the outcomes whatever he chose. In light of these conclusions, which follow deductively from the very definition of God, there is no such thing as free will, because God set all of our actions into motion at the beginning of the universe with foreknowledge of the results. It's important that we have free will, because otherwise what's the moral value of anything we do? So, theologists have struggled for centuries to rationalize how we could possibly have free will without weakening the definition of God. As for science, a century ago scientists really wanted the world to be deterministic, and could credibly suppose that they would eventually find out all the rules such that a sufficiently advanced computer could compute the state of the universe at any given time from any known starting state. And in the early 20th century, a few tricky puzzles in the nature of particles turned out to reveal what is now the consensus among scientists -- that the world cannot possibly be fundamentally deterministic. At the quantum level, we find that reality behaves probabilistically. So in fact, the Abrahamic religions are still locked in a deterministic conundrum, because they cannot change their fundamental idea of God. But science is no longer bound to determinism, because scientists were able to change their idea of what nature was like on a basic level.

I have a standard spiel on this, which I'm adapting here for repost: Latin is the ur-language that unites a lot of languages used in the west. If it's true, as is claimed on Wikipedia, that the study of Interlingua helps one puzzle through Spanish better than the same amount of time spent actually studying Spanish, then Latin would be at least that useful, since Interlingua is basically Latin without inflectional endings. It's also possible with a knowledge of Latin to suss out Spanish or Italian with a few simple rules. Latin helps with learning biological nomenclature. Of course, you can also just study the nomenclature by itself. Most scientists do. Those, however, don't end up learning much about Latin. The person who studies Latin, on the other hand, gets way out ahead in the study of scientific nomenclature and is in the enviable position of not merely memorizing, but understanding. Note that this advantage is cumulative with the advantage discussed above. Latin is often cited as a good way to build up verbal scores in standardized tests, and not without evidence. But in fact, it simply stands to reason. 60% of English words come from Latin, and that jumps to 80% when you look at words of three or more syllables. How many syllables on average are you expecting per word in the SAT? Furthermore, those English words from Latin mean what they mean because of morphological rules that are not themselves carried over into English morphology, so English doesn't teach you how to decode them. You can just study the English vocabulary directly, but the same amount of effort in Latin vocabulary plus derivational rules yields a rich English vocabulary as well. It's also possible to just study the cheat sheet on Latin derivation, which will certainly help. But you won't get any of the advantages mentioned in the previous two paragraphs, which are cumulative. Latin is also a highly ordered and logical language, and is traditionally promoted as part of a complete curriculum that exercises rational faculties. Of course, you can and should study logic itself as well as mathematics and rhetoric. But it's not as though the advantages of all these approaches to analytic training don't stack. They are cumulative with those of Latin, which includes all the above discussed advantages as a free bonus. It's true that you don't come out of a Latin class with the ability to communicate with living people (ignoring for the moment that the community is growing now that the internet is here to connect them). But let's not pretend that high schools are cranking out fluent second language speakers either. You can parlay your halting high school French into continuing studies, but most people don't. They let it wither and fade, and the advantage in principle that it's an actual living language is rarely an advantage in fact. The opportunity cost for that advantage that never manifested is all the things enumerated above that Latin teaches you, which are cumulative. Latin builds a diverse intellectual portfolio which pays reliable dividends however the market changes. Modern languages are high-yield investments with little liquidity.

I would caution that the second book of the Roman Mysteries has a puzzle that depends on certain facts about Latin that the author got wrong. It's nothing that can't be fixed in the actual teaching of Latin, and explaining why it's wrong is a little lesson in itself, but it irks me that the book teaches misunderstandings about Latin.

It is important to spell Latin words correctly, and the macrons are part of spelling. Spelling determines pronunciation, and pronunciation is the breath and heartbeat of the language. The link between spelling and pronunciation is much easier to learn in Latin than in English. Why not take advantage of that? Teach spelling by speaking the words out loud.

I'd say go ahead and have him read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He'll never again have a chance to read it for the first time as a kid, innocent of many of its profound implications, both delightful and troubling. You can get into that later. Also, the lesser known Tom Sawyer stories like Tom Sawyer, Detective may only be enjoyable at a young age. They were for me. Also, around the same time I was very fond of these: The Tripod Trilogy by John Christopher The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (another one to return to later to see how much more you get out of it) A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'engle Some books that I think my ten-year-old self would have loved, if they had been around, or I had known about them: The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett The Lives of Christopher Chant by Diana Wynne Jones The Homeward Bounders by Diana Wynne Jones The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander The Westmark Trilogy by Lloyd Alexander The Hobbit (never did read it as a child) And I've been told that a person of my interests has been shamefully remiss for not having read the Leatherstocking tales of James Fenimore Cooper.

Part of my master's thesis was on versification in English and Latin, and I have a great deal to say on the subject of what people need to know about poetry. But much of what I wish the world would stop not understanding about poetry is explained in Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Traveled. Unlike me, Fry does not yell at anybody. You should have a copy, and you should seriously consider working through it one chapter at a time, trying your own hand at the exercises. And that recommendation I make independent of any consideration of homeschooling. If I were teaching a full course of poetry at any level, it would be the coursebook. Even if I didn't teach directly out of it, I would end up returning to it again as a touchstone. Now, there are other texts that I would recommend having on hand when you build a foundation of appreciating poetry. Robert Wallace's Writing Poems (I'm only familiar with the 2nd edition) is both congenial and profound. I picked it up at a campus book sale for two bits two decades ago and was like breaking dawn banishing the dark. John Hollander, whose work is essential reading if you get any deeper into the subject of English versification, wrote Rhyme's Reason, an introductory text that explains many verse forms in poems written in those forms, so that what is happening on the prosodic level is also happening on the literal level of the verse. A lovely book. While I understand Candid's zeal for the sublime of which poetry is capable, do not ignore or ever abandon the ridiculous, the frivolous, the childish modes that poetry takes. Someone, whose name I forget, once commented that no one loves poetry who does not love the cataloging of ship names in the Iliad. I wouldn't go that far, but for similar reasons I will assert that no one loves poetry who does not love nursery rhymes and limericks.

In the Terry Pratchett book Snuff, there's a children's book called The World of Poo. Subsequently, they actually published The World of Poo as a separate book. I haven't gotten a chance to read it myself, but in the world of the novel it was described as very much the kind of thing the OP is talking about.

Some 24 Asterix stories have been translated into Latin. Of course, both the Asterix.com site and Vicipaedia list Asterix et Latraviata, though I can find no other evidence that a Latin translation of this title exists. Try searching the titles in Amazon, Alibris or AbeBooks. A number of the earlier ones can be found for around $20. Make sure it says Latin, though because sometimes the title is very similar in French or Spanish.

If you're already looking at Winnie Ille PÅ«, I'm not sure what you mean by basic. But... The Dr. Seuss books in Latin are going to be too challenging for a while, except that I still think there's value in reading something to a child that he can't understand yet, and eventually they will be wonderful for using the poetics of the words to get certain grammatical concepts and idioms in the head. You should definitely look into getting them eventually. In the meantime: OlÄ«via: The Essential Latin Edition is, I think you'll find, much more readable. Walter, Canis ĪnflÄtus is certainly a simple story, not without vocabulary challenges. Also, your views about encouraging humor about farts may vary. FÄbulae MÄ«rÄbilÄ“s has one picture per story, but is very readable once you have been introduced to the perfect system. A nice possibility for bedtime reading. AstÄ“rix Comics translated into Latin are nice, though they use the full scope of grammar and idiom of the language. Some of the issues are common and can be found cheap if you look around. Others are rare. Amor Est SÄ“nsus QuÄ«dam PeculiÄris is a little treacly, but can often be found cheap. BeÄta Illa Nox is nice for a dramatic reading and is illustrated throughout. DÄ“ ThesaurÅ PÄ«rÄtÄrum may be difficult to get your hands on, though I've seen it come up in AbeBooks and Alibris, It's a cute story of mouse pirates, with pictures. The Latin translations of Beatrix Potter can be difficult and expensive to get ahold of, though you can find my own translation of a version available from Project Gutenberg at my web site. Keep in mind that these translations were done years ago and I haven't had time to go through and fix mistakes that I would not now make. Ferdinandus Taurus is, I suspect, exactly what you need. Fairly simple Latin with a beautifully illustrated story. LepusculÅrum Schola is rendered in iambic verse, and if you can read German you've got a translation key right there. Otherwise it may be a vocabulary challenge. NutÄ«culus SatyrÄ«que is a translation of a story about a famous British children's character called Edith Blyton's Noddy. Edith Blyton is usually mentioned when Noddy comes up. Also: technically the Daleks are Terry Nation's Daleks. It's the British, what can you do? The illustrations appear to be photographs of claymation figures, like in our own animated specials like Frosty the Snowman, and there's no Ciceronian grammar to deal with. MarÄ«a Poppina ab A-Z has pages of illustration faced with blocks of text about the characters of the alphabet. Good potential for excercising vocabulary. MÄter Ä€nserina is a collection of nursery rhymes translated to match the rhythms of the English originals. Most are illustrated, and more readable than the Latin translation of A Child's Garden of Verse. It comes with a CD. Some of the pronuntiations I'm not entirely happy with. ÅŒ, Loca TÅ« Ībis is a misguided attempt to make Latin reading easier by translating Dr. Suess' Oh the Places you'll go into the same word order in Latin. It's terrible. Not only are there basic misunderstandings about what the words mean in here, in some cases where there is no even bad word-replacement option available, the translator simply put in the english word in quotes. The various Peanuts Latin collections are usually hard to find and expensive. No way around it. If you check persistently on eBay, Amazon, Alibris or AbeBooks you might catch one going for $20, but if you're not a collector it might not be worth your trouble. They would however make nice little Latin lessons to read and talk about with your child. The ELI Disney comics are generally even more rare and expensive in Latin. RÄ“gulus may be grammatically difficult in Latin for a while, but is worth keeping an eye on. Nicely illustrated, but it's paragraphs of text rather than sentences. TÄ“la Charlottae will be readable well before Regulus, though not what you'd call a picture book. A really nice early Latin chapter book, and cheap copies of it seem to pop up all the time. TrÄ“s MÅ«rÄ“s CaecÄ« is a book you probably should go ahead and get right now. It's got simple text, nice illustrations and it's reasonably cheap and easy to get your hands on. TrÄ“s UrsÄ« is also a good introductory level of text. I'm a little miffed that they blur the distinction between sedÄ“re and cÅnsÄ«dere, but I'd recommend putting it on your short list whatever level your child is at. VÄ“rÄ“, Virginia, SÄnctus Nicolaus Est! is a cute little book. I myself would be ashamed to have attempted to bamboozle a child with this kind of equivocation about the ontological status of Santa Claus, but your views may diverge. Other than that, what you probably should look at right now is the Tarheel Reader site, and check out what they have under Latin. You may find that there's a wealth of readers that suit your needs. Here's one sample that would seem to fit your needs. And many of the Latin readers created there employ macrons to help develop that classical voice.

I was with them all the way with The Breakfast Club, being myself an angsty teenager. Sure, I didn't actually find the stereotypes to accurately portray the kinds of people I met in high school. But I was sympathetic to the characters as they were. Right up until somebody said, "Maybe when you grow up your heart just dies." Even the brooding self-righteous child that I was I threw my hands up, "Oh, for crying out loud!" Otherwise, you know, an enjoyable film.

Well, I was also neglecting the influence that the Dorothy Sayers essay The Lost Tools of Learning has had on the homeschooling movement, not least because of the influence it had on the book on which this message board is founded.

I have asked myself why it is that homeschoolers are so much more concerned about Latin than parents of public or even private school children. I think it's because those others don't care as much, and the institutions they depend on don't care as much. Whatever arguments I may make for utility of studying Latin, these are window dressing. Homeschoolers embrace Latin because it's an outstanding example of what they can do better than outside schooling can do. And maybe that is not enough. But, that benefit is cumulative with all the other benefits I mentioned. As for me, I will be teaching my child Latin -- reading, writing and composition. And I fully expect that most of the people he can communicate with this way will have been homeschooled.

I have a standard spiel on this, which repeats but I hope synthesizes points already made in this thread: Latin is the ur-language that unites a lot of languages used in the west. If it's true, as is claimed on Wikipedia, that the study of Interlingua helps one puzzle through Spanish better than the same amount of time spent actually studying Spanish, then Latin would be at least that useful, since Interlingua is basically Latin without inflectional endings. It's also possible with a knowledge of Latin to suss out Spanish or Italian with a few simple rules. It has also been mentioned that Latin helps with learning biological nomenclature. Of course, you can also just study the nomenclature by itself. Most do. Those, however, don't end up learning much about Latin. The person who studies Latin, on the other hand, gets way out ahead in the study of scientific nomenclature and is in the enviable position of not merely memorizing, but understanding. Note that this advantage is cumulative with the advantage discussed above. Latin is often cited as a good way to build up verbal scores in standardized tests, and not without evidence. But in fact, it simply stands to reason. 60% of English words come from Latin, and that jumps to 80% when you look at words of three or more syllables. How many syllables on average are you expecting per word in the SAT? Furthermore, those English words from Latin mean what they mean because of morphological rules that are not themselves carried over into English morphology, so English doesn't teach you how to decode them. You can just study the English vocabulary directly, but the same amount of effort in Latin vocabulary plus derivational rules yields a rich English vocabulary as well. It's also possible to just study the cheat sheet on Latin derivation, which will certainly help. But you won't get any of the advantages mentioned in the previous two paragraphs, which are cumulative. Latin is also a highly ordered and logical language, and is traditionally promoted as part of a complete curriculum that exercises rational faculties. Of course, you can and should study logic itself as well as mathematics and rhetoric. But it's not as though the advantages of all these approaches to analytic training don't stack. They are cumulative with those of Latin, which includes all the above discussed advantages as a free bonus. It's true that you don't come out of a Latin class with the ability to communicate with living people (ignoring for the moment that the spoken Latin community is growing now that the internet is here to connect them). But let's not pretend that high schools are cranking out fluent second language speakers either. You can parlay your halting high school French into continuing studies, but most people don't. They let it wither and fade, and the advantage in principle that it's an actual living language is rarely an advantage in fact. The opportunity cost for that advantage that never manifested is all the things above that Latin teaches you, which are cumulative. Latin builds a diverse intellectual portfolio which pays reliable dividends however the market changes. Modern languages are high-yield investments with little liquidity

Those online Latin translators have been a plague on the internet, television and, alas, on tattoos. I saw an episode of CSI: New York that featured jibberish Latin that apparently these geniuses could read just like it was the funny papers. I found an online translator that gave the same nonsense translation for the English it was supposed to represent, only it turned out that there were misspellings that appear to have been caused by adding a stage of oral transmission to the process. Some people in a graphics department actually mocked up dollar bills with the nonsense Latin phonetically misspelled.

The word being translated here is the Greek logos, which has a whole nest of meanings including the relatively ordinary ones expressed by verbum, meaning 'word', and sermō, meaning conversation or discourse. These words are perfectly fine to capture the ordinary sense of logos, though none of its broader philosophical import. I'm not a theologist, or an expert on the pre-Socratics, but the gist of it is that logos is a spark of intelligence that is the divinity of God which is shared with his creations -- i.e., what is meant by 'created in God's image'. Of course, that's just one traditional reading.

Given how quickly people dismiss the importance of consistent pronunciation, I am constantly vexed at the shoddiness of audio aids. Learners are easily intimidated by pronunciation, but a good CD or DVD could build familiarity directly through experience. But nobody needs help pronouncing Latin haphazardly, and I am galled that so many programs are actually charging money for the service. The Tunbergs went through a lot of trouble carrying over the poetic voices of Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein into Latin. But if you can't pronounce the language, you can't hear the poetry. That's not even to mention a long history of Latin poetry that throughout multiple dialects and evolving traditions has managed to make its rhythms heard across centuries, only to find our modern age so eager to dispense with it because even people who adventure to study Latin these days don't see the value in preserving its voice at the cost of a bit of extra effort. But, as I say, a good audio aid of consistent pronunciation would go a long way toward easing the frustration of learners trying to master pronunciation. I'm making a note here to start a list of which programs are known to be slip-shod in pronunciation. I will say that the recordings that are part of Lingua Latīna per sē Illūstrāta is nicely consistent, with some quirks that are more interesting than confounding. I have a program called Latin Memory Songs which I found of variable consistency. Anyone have another candidate?

The complaint I hear most often is that people don't have a feel for what these numbers mean the way that they do for Imperial or U.S. units. I think it may be because we teach it as a one-off before going back and not thinking about it again. What I do instead is actually use the metric system, for cooking, in measuring for curtains, in my thermostat and anytime I look up weather forecasts online. Here are a few tidbits which help to put things in perspective. On the temperature scale, it's useful to own Celsius thermometers. I have one in most rooms of the house, and I keep one monitoring the outside. This way I have learned what degrees Celsius feel like. Here's a quick mnemonic to get started: 30 is hot, 20 is nice, 10 is cold, 0 is ice. Everyone is accustomed to the fact that the average human temperature is 98.6 Fahrenheit. Where does that odd number come from? It's converted from a rounder number in Celsius: 37 C = 98.6 F = Average human body temperature 38 C = 100.4 = The start of a fever 40 C = 104 = The starting range of a fever that could cause brain damage The very specific numbers you get by converting these temperatures to Fahrenheit disguise the fact that they are actually arbitrarily chosen to be nicely round numbers on the Celsius system, making the Fahrenheit numbers look artificially precise. As for mass, of course water weighs 1 gram per ml. But in fact, most household liquids are close enough to this density that this holds true enough to gain a general idea of the relation of volume to mass for many tasks in the kitchen. I personally think everyone should own a digital gram weight kitchen scale. I have a book called Ratio, which has a lot of basic recipes translated into the underlying weight ratios, and this makes cooking a lot easier, and could also be helpful in developing a sense of measurements through use. Here's a useful tidbit for getting familiar with the 'feel' of gram weight: the US nickel weighs 5 grams by specification. For length, it is helpful to remember the specifications for the very familiar CDs and DVDs. They are 12 cm across. The hole in the middle is 2 cm in diameter. That makes the distance between the outer edge and the hole 5 cm. I don't recall at what age I could do money computations, but it is handy to keep in mind that if you ever need a rough idea of how a specification in inches relates to centimeters, you can think of inches as quarters and centimeters as dimes. If you have 46 quarters, you can work out that it amounts to $11.50. Now convert to dimes -- 115. 46 inches is about 115 centimeters.

Previously they didn't have a Kindle version available. Now they do. What do you know, that button does do something!

I was happy to discover at the recent Conventiculum Lexingtoniense that not only am I not the only stay-at-home father involved, but there was also a lovely homeschooling family. There was a buzz this year about a new translation of The Hobbit into Latin. Apparently I'm just not on whatever grapevine it was where this news was going around months ago. Lo, it is true. Since little actual text is available to peruse, I couldn't say yet how the translation stands up, but some samples of the translator's verses have appeared on line in his own Latin poetry journal Vates. So far, I find the spirit and the sounds of the chants have been pretty well preserved. I keep reading that these are supposed to be in Classical meter, but the author himself states that they are accentual. Here's an example: Chip the glasses and crack the plates! Blunt the knives and bend the forks! That's what Bilbo Baggins hates - Smash the bottles and burn the corks! frange vitra et catilla! cultrōs tunde, furcās flecte! Bilbō Baggīns ōdit illa – nunc et corticēs incende! He had to leave out the mention of the bottles, but that's pretty well within the license of a translator of verse. I can't wait to see the whole book.

Odd. It lists Lingua Latina as a lot more expensive than what I paid for it. I mean, if you buy all the supplemental texts, the vocabulary guides and the interactive CD-Rom I suppose it could get up to $138, but the core of the program, the basic text and the advanced text, I picked up pretty cheaply. It helps to monitor Amazon.

I have found that when doing immersive spoken Latin, different systems of pronunciation still communicate, in much the way that people across the US communicate with different accents. It's not just reconstructed vs. ecclesiastical -- some countries have their own idiosyncrasies in how they teach Latin pronunciation. On top of that, there are often just mistakes and various relaxations which are an inherent part of how spoken language works. With sufficient familiarity, you learn to listen through these differences. However... I put the idea that the details of pronunciation don't matter in the same bin with the idea that people don't need to study writing more formal than what you get in e-mail. Yes, much future communication will be done by the lax standards that have become acceptable in most internet forums, however, the capacity to read through different levels of laxness is specifically enhanced by being familiar with the language in its more formal usage. And if what you actually learn is a much less formal version, it's harder to climb back the other way. I fear for the generation that will soon be told that they don't need to learn better English than they use in text messages. Much of the world of books will be shut to them. As for Latin pronunciation, some standard must be learned well, and doing so will make deviations from it easier to read through. Among the reasons I favor the reconstructed classical pronunciation is that it is a higher level of formality -- you could take it and, with some simple rules, speak ecclesiastic Latin. You cannot go from ecclesiastical Latin and apply rules to reconstruct vowel quantities except in certain kinds of cases. Those vowel quantities you did not learn are not recoverable by rule. The vowel quantities that the ecclesiastical pronunciation does away with are essential to the aesthetic of Roman poetry. Poetry isn't just meaning, it's a purposeful interplay of sound and sense. Of course, since Late Roman times, stress-based prosody has been more the norm. But the locations of those stresses must be learned if you're going to sense the rhythm of modern works like the Tunberg translation of Green Eggs and Ham, for example. So, the ecclesiastical crowd often documents where the stresses are so you can memorize them. This does not seem to be significantly less work than just memorizing the vowel sounds, from which the stresses can be discovered by rule. For a comparable amount of effort, you actually end up with less knowledge.

I frequently recommend Lingua Latina per Se Illustrata as a general reader whatever text you use to study grammar. For that, it doesn't much matter what level of grammar you are currently at, because you might as well start from the beginning and when you get to the parts that are hard to read, you know where your reading level is. Otherwise, there are loads of options, though finding the ones right for your kid's level may take some research. One thing you might find useful is to search Google Books for the term gradatim. It means 'by steps' and is often used in the title of books of graded Latin readers. But if you insist on having nothing to do with mythology or war, your options are considerably constrained. There is Nutting's First Latin Reader, which is unusual in that it deals primarily with early American history (there will be some war involved). Ora Maritima is a very nice reader that drills on forms while discussing a pleasant seaside town, eventually with some flashbacks to war. If you're not adverse to fables, Laura Gibbs gathers all the ones she can find in various sources and presents them online. In fact, she does a selection of them called Fabulae Faciles, which she has tweaked to be friendlier to learners and added vocabulary lists. These are great for gaining familiarity with various constructions in use, as well as learning the names of animals you may not have thought to look up, and gaining a daily dose of ancient wisdom.

I would recommend making sure your kid is comfortable already with reading the earlier book Familia Romana. I find that the jump between these two texts is fairly broad. Of course, finding the sweet spot between the difficulty levels of these two texts is tricky. I can go on about how I feel about the various texts that Focus, the publisher, recommends as bridges, but I'll go ahead and give you the upshot: I think their re-published Epitome Historiae Sacrae will provide the smoothest transition. Be sure you get the Focus publishing edition, and not the printout of an old scanned copy. If you can track down copies at reasonable prices, Fabulae Graecae and Fabulae Romanae are nice readers. Fabulae Graecae is basically an edition of Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles, which is available in the public domain, but the Longman edition here has accompanying notes and explanations which are useful whether they're new to the student or a review. As for grammar, Bennett's is available from Gutenberg, and in a nice Bolchazy edition. But my vade mecum is the Bolchazy edition of Bradley's Arnold. One parent here, I forget who, actually mentioned using this as their current Latin curriculum, which I think is a terrific idea even if you aren't using the translation exercises. Not only does it have clear explanations for many grammatical concepts explained as you'd need to understand them to actually use them, but you can even look up certain words that have peculiar rules associated with them.

Fortunately, Latin is spelled more-or-less like it is pronounced. This gives you a powerful tool for learning spelling -- speak it out loud.

Specifically, what she's done is to gather all the Latin versions she can find in out-of-copyright sources and cataloged them and represented them in arrangements for different educational purposes. She's done much the same for Latin proverbs and has begun also gathering anecdotes she finds. You could do worse than to visit her blog every second day or so, because she presents part of her catalog in each category each day, so you can find a worthy translation exercise just handed to you on a regular basis. First of all, many of the things on the second list are a waste of money, including those items vanity-published and reviewed glowingly by the author B. Smith. I got suckered into buying Puer Zingerbri and I can just cry thinking of the money I wasted on the overpriced, badly translated crap accompanied by discolored printouts of blocky jpegs. Many of the other items on the list are sources available for free from sources like Google Books or Archive.org. Now, mind you they do seem to have at least OCRed the text rather than simply re-printed the freely available PDFs, so if you really need a bound hardcopy you might consider the price worth it, but I wouldn't assume the editing is a quality job, and editing mistakes can lead to tremendous frustration for a language learner. Now, as a general comment I'd like to point out that children's books written in or translated into Latin are not necessarily easy for children to read or translate. At some point, I need to develop an FAQ about this to guide parents as to the stage at which the many sources available may be profitably used in Latin study. But here are some brief comments on some of the readily available children's books in Latin: Winnie Ille Pū - Translatable, though I think you'll find that it needs the full-forty of Wheelock or equivalent before you tackle it. In any case, be sure and get the edition marked as revised, with notes and glossary. Makita - An easy-reader, if you already have the full-forty under your belt. I particulary like the fact that the glossary in the back gives definitions in Latin. Walter, Canis Īnflātus - Generally, I don't like having the English already given. But I think if your kid relies on it being the same as what the Latin says, he'll get caught out. Also, the subject matter is controversal in my household. It's not that we don't want to expose the child to the subject of farting, it's just that we don't think adults should be involved in children's discussions of such things. Bella Illa Nox - Not available new, but not hard to find. The translation does not match well with the rhythm of the English original The Night Before Christmas, but it can be lilted in a sing-song way. Vērē, Virginia, Sānctus Nicolaus est! - The Latin text is presented here twice: once in Latin, and once alongside the original English. Dē Gallīnīs Ferōcibus - You can easily find this through Alibris or Abebooks, though it is published in Germany. It's a nicely dialogue-heavy story, with some neo-Latin vocabulary which unfortunately for us is glossed in German. It's not a transitional reader, but it's a light and fun story for about the same age group that the old Alvin Fernald books were written for. Olīvia (The Essential Latin Edition) - There is not a lot of text here, but what there is should be translatable pretty early in a kid's Latin education. Just scanning here, it looks like there are no verbs given in the Perfect system. There is no vocabulary gloss, but I don't think finding the words or sussing them out in context will be a particular problem. Ferdinandus Taurus - A pretty easy translation, once you are into the perfect system, and it would be an easy read if you had the vocabulary. Readily available cheap, I highly recommend it. Trēs Mūrēs Caecī - An easy reader with short sentences in the present system with vocabulary in the back. Lebusculōrum Schola - Another children's Latin book from Germany, but not hard to get your hands on in the internet age. I can't speak to the German text, but the Latin is in nicely rhythmic slant-rhymed couplets. Since you don't get a lot of complex sentences, it should serve well as a transitional translation exercise. Fābulae Mīrābilēs - Readily available and absolutely not to be missed. It's marked as for "Intermediate and Advanced Students". I don't know what their criteria are, but it requires at least an understanding of the Latin perfect system. Harrius Potter - People want this to be a fun way to practice Latin, but this is a full-forty level of Latin, and contains neo-Latin vocabulary that is not glossed anywhere in the book. There are also some editing mistakes that will prove a frustrating diversion from any fun your child might have trying to translate the text. But once you're at an advanced level of Latin, it is a delightful read. Let me also just go ahead and deal with the Lexingtonian Latin translations in a bunch. In the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Terrence Tunberg, his wife Guenevera Tunberg and his colleague Milena Minkova. So far, they have produced among them Cattus Petasātus (The Cat in the Hat), Quōmodo Invidiōsulus Nōmine Grinchus Christī Nātālem Abrogāverit (How the Grinch Stole Christmas), Virent Ōva Viret Perna! (Green Eggs and Ham), Māter Ānserina (Mother Goose) and Abor Alma (The Giving Tree). In general, these are intermediate in terms of grammar, and so would make good translation exercises for students who have already gotten to the perfect system. Each of these books has vocabulary, and they are translated into Latin that matches the prosodic qualities of the original English, which I particularly like, but note the effect this has on the use of these texts for translation: the Latin doesn't say exactly what the English originals said, in many cases. Your kid can't expect his understanding of the English version to do all the work for him, but it will certainly help. Of these, I particularly recommend getting a hold of Māter Ānserina early, because not only does it have glossed vocabulary on each page, and accent marks to help the reader bring out the poetics of the translations, it also comes with a CD of the rhymes being read and sung, which can allow a kid to learn the rhymes even before he's ready to translate them and can then serve as groundwork for a later understanding of points of grammar for which the child has already committed an example to memory.