I just wrote a note to the LfC publisher on their website (www.classicalacademicpress.com) I'm pasting it below if anyone is interested: ___________________________ Hello, I am a homeschooling dad and have been using your LfC Primer A material this year with my son who is 10 years old (4th grade). I purchased the Primer A bundle including the textbook, activity book, DVD, flashcards, and history reader. I love almost everything about the LfC program, but my one complaint is such that I'm thinking of finding a new program for next year. The one thing I think is missing is that there are just so few translation exercises. There are a great many clever puzzles and games in the activity book but few in the way of straight forward sentence translation. The history reader looked promising, but my son was frustrated with how much new vocabulary was added to it. Overall I wish that less time had been devoted to trying to entertain the student with "fun" games and derivative lessons and that more focus had been given to basic translation skills. What I'm looking for as I consider the Primer B materials is one of two things: either an assurance that the next set of books includes more sentence translations, or some additional material that coincides with each chapter which uses the appropriate vocabulary as it builds through the book. Before we used LfC we spent a year with another author's book called Getting Started with Latin. Although this book was less rigorous, each daily lesson included 10 sentences my son could translate. I loved that and he enjoyed it as well. Could you tell me if you offer for sale (or download) anything like that to accompany your program? Thank you for your time.

Hello all! :) My name is JD and I'm a homeschooling dad (a rare breed, I know!) Last year my son was in 3rd grade and we started Latin Lessons by using Getting Started with Latin. My son and I both loved this book and it gave us a great taste for learning more Latin together. The only downside was that it was only good for one year. For this year I chose Latin for Children and we've just recently finished Primer A. We both still like LfC, but I have one complaint. There are just not enough translation exercises. I wish it devote less time to derivatives and more time to translating. The grammar is great, though, even the new vocabulary was sometimes overwhelming (and not adequately reinforced through translation exercises). So here's my question: Has anyone else had this reaction to LfC Primer A and what did you do about it? Does Primer B get better in this regard? Are there sets of translation exercises for this program that I'm missing? I have the activity book, but that's mostly clever mazes and word searches and the like. I'm not sure if we should stick it out with Primer B for next year or switch to something else. Any advice or recommendations would be appreciated. Thanks! -JD

Cuisenaire Rods. My kids have loved them for years. In fact, I used them back in my hippy, open classroom, unschooling elementary school myself, back in the 70's.

Thank you all for your recommendations. I just finished browsing through Netflix's offerings and came up with the following list (in no particular order). Netflix Watch it Now 1. Guns, Germs and Steel 2. Stonehenge Decoded 3. Egypt’s Golden Empire 4. Ancient Egyptians 5. Ancient Egypt Unearthed 6. Egyptian Secrets of the Afterlife - Egypt 7. The Greeks, Crucible of Civilization - Greek 8. Herod’s Lost Tomb – Egypt 9. Colosseum, A Gladiator’s Story 10. Dawn of the Maya 11. Battlefield Detectives: Alesia 12. Into the Great Pyramid - Egypt 13. Egypt Pharoes 14. Who was Jesus? 15. Joseph Campbell: Sukhavati 16. Legacy: The Origins of Civilization 17. Secrets of Jerusalem’s Holiest Sites (National Geographic) 18. Lost Treasures of the World: China Netflix Discs 1. Clash of the Cavemen 2. Metropolis (Ancient Cities) 3. Stonehenge 4. Lost Treasures of the World: India 5. Egypt Uncovered 6. Building the Great Pyramid 7. Lost Temple of the Gods - Egypt 8. Ancient Voices 9. The Legions of Rome: Punic Wars 10. The Minotaur’s Island 11. Macedonia: The Land of a God 12. The First Merchants 13. Lost Treasures of the World: Seven Wonders 14. Lost Treasures of the World: Greece 15. Secrets of Egypt’s Lost Queen 16. The Mysteries of Egypt: The Pharoes 17. Athens: The Dawn of Democracy 18. Engineering Egypt 19. Secrets of Archaeology 20. Eastern Philosophy 21. Troy 22. Lost Gospels or False Gospels? 23. Helen of Troy 24. Quest for the Lost Pharoh 25. Nubia: The Forgotten Kingdom 26. Secrets of the Rosetta Stone 27. David Macaulay: Roman City 28. Biblical Mysteries: Arc of the Covenant 29. Legends of the Arabian Nights 30. Last Stand of the 300 – Greek 31. Rome: Rise and Fall of an Empire – Rome 32. The True Story of Alexander the Great 33. Alexander and the Devastating Catapult 34. The Roman Empire in the 1st Century – Rome 35. Rome: Engineering and Empire 36. Apostolic Fathers: Handing on the Faith 37. Ancient Civilizations: Rome and Pompeii 38. Boudicca: Warrior Queen (Roman Era) 39. Ancient Discoveries 40. Clash of the Gods – Mythology, General 41. Julius Caesar’s Rome – Rome 42. Secrets of the Code 43. Exploring the Da Vinci Code 44. Barbarians – Fall of Roman Empire 45. In Search of History: The Greek Gods 46. The True Story of Hannibal 47. Seven Wonders of the Ancient World 48. The Spartans 49. The Germanic Tribes 50. Secrets of Lost Empires: NOVA

I'm planning to start using SOTW for ancient history with my 4th grade son this year. I'd like to augment the book and other materials with some good documentary videos we can watch before bedtime. I was wondering if anyone can recommend a place to start. I would like to compile a list of videos ahead of time so that I can prepare ahead of time a good order in which to watch them. Has anyone here tried this before? Thanks! -jd

My son is just finishing up 3rd grade right now. This year we started learning Latin together and we've been using Song School Latin alongside William Linney's "Getting Started with Latin". Next year I plan to try LFC A. SSL would be great for younger kids, but I think it's really too basic to be used by 3rd grade. We usually do 1 lesson from SSL per week, but each lesson only teaches the nominative case of 4 or 5 basic nouns. At the same time that we've working on 1 SSL lesson per week, we've also done 1 lesson of GSwL per school day. Each lesson in this program teaches a new word or concept each day and then asks the student to translate 10 Latin sentences into English using all the cumulative knowledge learned to date. We haven't finished the book yet, but it has taught us a whole slew of nouns and verbs as well as the proper uses of 1st declension nominative, genitive, accusative and ablative cases. I have been much happier with GSwL than with SSL for my 3rd grader. He does like the musical CD in SSL, but GSwL is just the right amount of challenge. It has pushed him to apply many of the grammar skills he has learned in First Language Lessons in order to decode the Latin sentences. It is sometimes frustrating for him when the sentences are longer and more complex, but it's the kind of frustration that shows he is learning a difficult skill. If you haven't looked at Getting Started with Latin yet, I really recommend looking into it. The only drawback is that it's not a full program, but only a 1 year introduction.