I'm sure it will be the next Lost. Which is why I refuse to watch. :)

It isn't a mistake. There is no consensus on what the fourth principal part of Latin verbs should be. The -um form is the -m (or I) supine, which is a very rarely used verbal. The -us form is the perfect passive participle, which is much more commonly used. These two forms are syntactically very close -- you can always form one from the other just by swapping the m for the s. That means, for the purpose the principle parts are needed for, they are functionally identical. Some dictionaries list the 4th part as the participle, because you'll use it a lot more than the supine. The problem with this is that not all verbs have passive forms -- e.g. some are intransitive, and those don't have passive participles. Some dictionaries which use the participial form then switch to the future active participle for the 4th part of intransitive verbs.

I totally agree with the above, and it seems to play out in practice, when talking with others who have started Latin very early. What I think _is_ important in the early years is to learn a modern language, or at least the pronunciation of one. I think a window to immersively learning a modern foreign language closes by about 5th grade. So, we're listening to a lot of Spanish during these years, and waiting until the middle school years for Latin.

I think figuring out how you memorize best is an incredibly valuable skill that transcends Latin or multiplication facts, and will serve him well in the future. Memorization in general is hard, but like any skill, you get better at it the more you do it. I don't know anything about auditory vs. visual learning, but I think that the more senses you engage (i.e. writing the paradigms out as you say them as you look at what you are writing out) helps the memorization process.

Different people memorize best in different ways. To succeed in Latin past the introductory levels, you need to know the declensions cold. You can squeak by without knowing them well in the early stages just based on context, but once you get to real latin, you can't rely on context alone. For Latin declensions, what I recommend is to write them all out from memory once or twice a day. That is, take out a blank sheet of paper, write the names of the cases down the left hand side (Nom., Gen., Dat...) once for singular, once for plural, across the top write an exemplar noun for each case/gender combination, and have him fill in the grid. This may seem tedious (because it is), but it is the best way I know to promote short term memory into long term memory. Do this every day for several months, and I suspect he won't be able to forget them. I think there's something about the process of writing them (and perhaps saying them out loud too) which helps the memorization process better than just reading from an online quiz. If he can't do them all, start with the ones he does know, and add a new declension once a week. Once you have them memorized, it should take just five minutes.

Note that "confirmata est" is a perfect passive compound verb, not est + a participle. So, the literal translation is "has been confirmed".

I don't think there is one.

I adore this quote from the Preface to "The Roman Way", written by Edith Hamilton (who clearly owned a Well Trained Mind): Note that "Six Weeks' Preparation for Caesar", being seriously out of copyright, is freely downloadable from google books, just go to google.com/books and search for it. The Adler Latin text is another fascinating 19th century work. Although it was never popular in its day, it is also freely available on google books, and making a bit of a comeback now. Of course both of these presume a fair amount of English grammar. There's a lot of questions on this forum (and in your linked article) about when to start teaching Latin. I think this question is worthless unto itself -- I hear of lots of Moms who start Latin in 3rd grade, but go too slowly to be much of any use -- commonly a year's worth of material will be the same as a week of high school Latin. Again and again I hear about kids who use some kind of easy intros to Latin from 3rd through 8th grade, but can't even test into a rigorous Latin II class when they are 9th graders. So, I think the question should be not just when to start Latin, but how rigorously to teach it at what grade levels. And to do this, it is important to think about goals. The Vulgate is easier to read than Caesar, who is much easier to read than Ovid or Virgil. If you want to read the Vulgate in 10th grade, you'll need to work backward from there. And, I don't quite understand your comment about vocabulary. Learning Latin vocab isn't particularly hard, as there are many cognates with English, and the total Latin vocabulary isn't terribly large, at least compared to ancient Greek and English. What even a rank beginner will need to memorize, however are the paradigms: this beginner will need to memorize something like 100 inflected noun endings, 700 verb endings and somewhere near 100 pronoun forms.

For the right kind of kid, a project about constructed languages could be really fun. For example, when the Star Trek folks created the Klingon language, what aspects about that fictional culture show up in the language? What did Tolkien do with the Elvish and Dwarfish languages to show their cultures? If you were to create a fictional language for your favorite fictional creature, what grammatical structures would it have? Would it be easy to translate?

But they get to say yes or no on a per-student basis. Do the public schools?

It is unfair for the kids, but I can kind of understand why the schools feel this way. Put yourself in the shoes of the transferring-to schools: all of a sudden you'd have an influx of new kids who have been taught to a lower (or even just different) standard than you have all these years. Your aggregate test scores are probably going to drop, at least for a few years, making you look bad. You'll probably need to hire a bunch of new teachers, and where will they come from? The bad schools too? You'll have to start a bunch of remedial classes too. That can't look good. As a homeschooler, I can't imagine how hard it would be to start to teach a high-school age student who hadn't been taught very rigorously previously.

NO! NO! NO! This is NOT a silly question, AT ALL. This is a great question that we don't talk nearly enough about around here. Methods of teaching are just as important, maybe even more so than the curriculum. All too often we are looking for a magic curriculum bullet that will solve all problems. The difficult thing is that different kids (and people) learn in different ways. The great thing about homeschooling is that we can tailor our teaching to our specific kids, whom we should know better than anyone. If you are starting out, I would experiment with lots of different methods and techniques. Even things like time of day you start can make a big difference. Some kids learn best from reading from a book, some from a "lecture", some from talking things out and asking lots of questions. Some need to write or draw pictures about what they are hearing in order for it to stick or make connections. Some like absolute silence, some need background music. Some need frequent breaks, others need long intense study times. Try different approaches, and "test" them frequently to see what is working best for you and them.

Ryan Gosling + Latin? Does it get any better? http://classicsryangosling.tumblr.com/

And the second part of statement is so important. Around here (in the US), Spanish is "taught" in the elementary schools, but at such a low level to not be useful. They play some games, learn some songs, and a handful of words. These kids then start Spanish "for real" in seventh grade, but with no advantage at all over those who didn't have this, so it is like not having taken it at all. I see the same thing in homeschooling communities with those who start Latin \ at age 6, with the desire to go very slowly, and in the course of several years manage to cover about a week or two of high school Latin. I'm not sure there's much value in this. The exception to this is our one Spanish immersion elementary school. These kids really learn Spanish. However, our school district is currently wringing their collective hands because these kids have lower Math and English scores than their non-immersed peers, so they are talking about cancelling the program.

I completely understand order of operations and why it is important, but I still don't understand why when you just have a -4, why the negative sign is considered an operation, and not intrinsically part of the number. If you have 1 - 4², to me, there isn't a negative four there, there is a subtraction operation on the result of 4 squared. What if you had 1 - -4²?

But why is -4 treated as a compound operation (-1 * 4), and not a single conceptual number? I looked it up, and it is correct, but just seems confusing. I think we'd all agree that 12 squared is 144, even though 12 is really 1 * 10 + 2 -- no one would say that 12 squared is 14 (i.e 1 * 10 + 2 squared) , but that seems to be the same thing as ripping the negative sign off of the 4, and applying the exponentation operator to the absolute value of the scalar -4.

Please don't think me too daft, but how do you count an hour? I assume this mimics PS, where 1 full credit would be roughly 1 hour a day of "direct instruction" in school for 150 days in a school year, and that same class would require between zero and three hundred hours of homework. For example, for a literature class, does reading time count?

I wonder if the OP's library actually has the book, but the phone-answerer couldn't successfully find it. Was the author listed at "Mark Twain", or "Samuel Clemens"? Did she get the title typed in correctly? Spelled the name of the title character correctly? Does it have this novel, but perhaps bound in a collection of other novels? I think we get spoiled by how forgiving google search is, and forget that other search systems aren't nearly so easy to use. More than once, I've been unable to find a book that our library actually had, because of typos or other searching errors.

I haven't used it, but I have looked through it. It is a solid textbook, especially now that the 2nd and 3rd volumes are out. It uses a mixture of the traditional "grammar-translation" method that texts like Wheelock use, and the "reading" method, used by books like the Cambridge Latin series. I think this is the first Latin textbook in about 400 years to cover not just classical Latin, but also medieval Latin as well. Last time I looked, it was a bit pricey. Aesthetically, it is a very nice looking text. There is a lot of correlated material at the publisher's web site: http://www.bolchazy.com/lnm I would say it is aimed at the high school market, and as with other high school texts, could be covered by say, a 7th or 8th grader at a slower pace. I would not try it with an elementary school student. I saw the comment about neologisms in an Amazon comment, I have no idea what the commenter was talking about. I think there are places in the book where it encourages spoken Latin, but I wouldn't count that as a strike against it.

This looks good, but it does strike me as a bit unusual to have Shakespeare and Dickens in world lit if you are also going to have a year of Brit. Lit.

:iagree: Often a team will have a relationship with a local swim store. Ask the coaches if they do (of either team). The folks at this store can help with fitting, not just suits, but goggles, fins, etc.

I think that setting expectations clearly is very important. I would respectfully disagree, though, with the idea that only "gifted" students can get through all of Wheelock in two years. I think this is mainly a matter of rigor and putting in the work. We do our kids a disservice when we tell them that success is only for those lucky ones who have won a genetic lottery. I think that most average to above average students ought to be able to do this by simply working hard at it. And this is an incredibly important lesson to teach. If you need to have two Latin tracks at your school, that may be the best thing for you and your students. I just wouldn't call the faster track the "gifted" track. I would call it the rigorous or intensive track, and set expectations appropriately.

This is a huge problem. I'm sorry I don't have a direct answer for your question, but I think if an online class is teaching students who do well on the upper level NLEs and Latin AP tests, then the teaching must be pretty complete. I don't think it is possible to "teach to the tests" for these. One thing I find I need to teach is how to make effective use of the study time a student does have. I encourage mine to use a flashcard app like Anki to use small chunks of time they might have scattered throughout their day to work on vocabulary memorization. I encourage them to write out paradigms daily. A question I have relates to the very early introduction of Latin to kids -- it is not uncommon on the Hive to hear about 10 year olds starting Latin instruction, though at a very, very slow pace, with something like the text "Getting Started with Latin", which I think covers about a week's worth of high school Latin. I'm curious if this kind of gentle introduction helps with your problem of completely covering all Latin grammar in two years of high school. Do any of your students have years of this kind of long, slow start to Latin? Does it really help? A lot of the time consuming work is just memorizing the paradigms. I think if students entered Latin I with all the noun and verb paradigms down, you'd have no problems getting grammar done by the end of Latin II.

I'm curious how much time your students put into the class. I think to get through all the chapters in two years, you really need to have an hour of class a day, every day of the week for a full (maybe more than a full) school year with substantial expectation of homework for memorization of forms and translation exercises.

Oh, you are memorizing them line-by-line, right? Unlike, verb conjugations and noun declensions, memorize the three nominative singular (masculine, feminine, neuter), then the three genitive singular, etc. This makes it much easier.