When do you begin Latin?

[happyhappyjoyjoy]

When do you begin Latin?

If you begin before 3rd grade, what do you use?

Thank you!

[MyLittleWonders]

We started this year with ds#1 in 3rd grade and ds#2 in 1st grade (and ds#3 in PreK, but he's just along for the ride ;) ) and are doing Song School Latin. Next year, we'll move on to Latin for Children A for at least ds#1. I'm not sure if I'll have ds#2 do LfC in 2nd grade or hold him off until 3rd grade. (Chances are, he'll do the DVD and CDs with us, but will not do the formal work; I'll have to see how it works.) So, other than ds#1 starting LfC A in what looks to be 4th grade, the other two boys will start in 3rd grade.

[elfinbaby]

I will start dd, K'er, when she is a competent reader. Probably next year in 1st grade. I'll being with Prima Latina. We'll go at her speed.

 

I started ds, 5th grade, just this January in Latina Christiana I. It's not challenging enough for him. We're doing 2 lessons/wk. so we can jump into First Form Latin (which I should have gone with originally).

 

If I were going to use Memoria Press materials, I'd start a 3rd grader in LCI. Anything before that, Prima imo.

 

We also use the DVDs. We have a wee one in the house so they are handy. He does the DVDs, workbook, copywork, and we review blessing/songs/vocab/grammar at the end of the week to make sure he's got it.

[robsiew]

I started my 3rd grader with Prima this year. It's pretty easy, but I'm okay with that since it was something new this year. He's enjoying it enough... I chose to wait until 3rd so he'd have a good reading/grammar foundation in English. I'm glad I did. All the grammar stuff is easily understood by him since he's already studied the parts of speech in English. I have a 2nd grader this year too who I could have started, but held off. Personally, I'm glad I did. If you really want, I think a 2nd grader could handle Prima.

[jenL]

:lurk5:

[Heidi]

I have heard, and am thinking about doing it as well, of doing Song School Latin in 1st, Latin's not so Tough 1 for 2nd grade, and Latin for Children A for 3rd grade, and continuing with LfC. Still researching... we'll see.

[Dinsfamily]

I have heard, and am thinking about doing it as well, of doing Song School Latin in 1st, Latin's not so Tough 1 for 2nd grade, and Latin for Children A for 3rd grade, and continuing with LfC. Still researching... we'll see.

 

 

I planning something similar. SSL in 1st, PL in 2nd, and either LfC or LCI in 3rd. SSL's a lock for next fall, but after that who knows...

[Lisa in the UP of MI]

We're starting Song School Latin next week, half-way through kindergarten. DS will be along for the ride. Whenever we finish I think we'll do Prima Latina (with plenty of hands-on activities and games added) and Minimus. I'm not sure what we'll do after that.

[happyhappyjoyjoy]

thanks everyone!

[Penny]

Starting Latin so young, you'd have to stick with strickly vocabulary. Learning vocabulary is quite easy; it's the grammar that's tough. However, even when learning vocabulary, the child will have to go back and learn the gender of the noun, or the conjugation of the verb at some point.

 

My dc began Latin in 3rd with Prima. The beginning of the book is simple enough as it concentrates on learning vocabulary very slowly. The end of the book just begins to get into state of being verb forms. I think this is too much for a child before 3rd. Actually, I see no point in beginning a child before 3rd at all, and learning Latin may come at the expense of something else. What I mean is that a child can only do a limited amount of school work in a day before he is saturated. This time would be better spent reading and understanding his world better (ie. science, history, nature studies).

 

Our progression has been:

 

3rd Prima

4th Latin Prep

5th Cambridge Unit 1

6th Cambridge Unit 2 and Latin Prep 2 (where we are currently)

 

Note that because we started early, we had to essentially slow down completely for 5th and do only Cambridge (easy compared to LP) to allow my child's mind to develop to be able to handle it! Latin gets tough fast. There really is no need to begin before 3rd. I think it is beneficial to wait until your child has a good grip on English and some English grammar under his belt. Don't forget that most moms start out so excited about Latin, then when we realize what we've gotten into (how very difficult it is) then we slow down and wonder why we began this in the first place, and how we're ever going to hang on. I'm having a tough time keeping up Latin now. (It takes me about 45 minutes a day prep time to do a good job teaching it.) If you do not know a foreign language, then it would be a good idea for you to get a Latin program yourself, and check out what is in store. I am glad we do Latin, but it does come at a cost and I think this cost is that we don't do science. I don't have super kids that can go more than 8 hours per day. Adding Latin is like adding a second math program; it requires very intense concentration and exhaustive thinking. So by the time we do math, grammar, Latin, writing, history, vocabulary, spelling, geography, and who knows what else I've forgotten, science never gets done except casually and/or in spurts.

 

Penny

[Ester Maria]

K informally (with my own materials and stuff taken from various textbooks), somewhere in the 3rd grade formally (mix of my own materials, texts and various textbooks).

 

I don't think one necessarily needs to start early, I started in 5th, studied it for 8 years, and never considered it a late start, and I had a very good command of the language and reading fluency when I entered university. I started earlier with my kids mainly because *they* wanted to, seeing all the Latin stuff around the house and being interested in the Romans, had good command of Italian and could read well so I thought, why not, we can easily drop it for later if it'll be too much. Appears it wasn't.

[Ester Maria]

Starting Latin so young, you'd have to stick with strickly vocabulary. Learning vocabulary is quite easy; it's the grammar that's tough. However, even when learning vocabulary, the child will have to go back and learn the gender of the noun, or the conjugation of the verb at some point.

There's some truth to this. Before about 3rd grade, what I did with my daughters was mostly, to say so, "cultural literacy" - proverbs, easier parts of texts, getting accustomed to the language and getting the basic grammar and cultural features down. I DID teach them grammar even before we started formally K, but I constantly had to have their age in mind and realize that they wouldn't be ready for subjunctives of the pluperfect and similar stuff for a few more years. So our Latin was mostly, Gallia est omnis divisa... and more talking about that than working on the actual text.

I found our Latin instruction for the first few years to be more of an extension of our Italian instruction than proper Latin. But the girls enjoyed it, so I kept up with it. At that point I was less concerned with grammar progress and more concerned with progress with regards to cultural notions they can pick up.

Actually, I see no point in beginning a child before 3rd at all, and learning Latin may come at the expense of something else. What I mean is that a child can only do a limited amount of school work in a day before he is saturated. This time would be better spent reading and understanding his world better (ie. science, history, nature studies).

You know what I tell you, with us they waited for 5th (yep, FIFTH) grade for these exact reasons. I attended a brilliant school and they could put Latin from first grade with no problems, but they felt we could truly benefit the most with a later start, allowing us time to learn the grammar of our first language (Italian) first, and to focus on modern foreign languages (and other school material, of course). The thing is, prior to certain age, kids can benefit the most out of immersion and unconscious language learning - those are perfect circumstances to learn a modern foreign language. The analytical approach to the language that Latin requires is just not suitable prior to some age for the vast majority of kids. Certainly, you can and will be exposed to some "cultural Latin" along the way, but not get it taught formally until you can access it analytically.

 

With that approach, we started in 5th and basically ended 7th having done the entire morphology, tons of cultural notions and work on text (the difficulty of which was increasing as we progressed), and most of the syntax. That left five years to deal exclusively with the text - five years of "proper" Latin, work on the actual literature. I don't think anything was lost with waiting till the 5th grade, and then covering more material and quicker.

Adding Latin is like adding a second math program; it requires very intense concentration and exhaustive thinking.

Yes, the "morphology stage" requires a lot of the same type of concentration you need when focusing on Math, I agree. The "syntax stage" - which a lot of people don't even reach since they get discouraged far before it - needs a somewhat different type of concentration and one's verbal skills can really profit out of it.

But the ACTUAL Latin is what comes AFTER you've learned morphology and syntax. Morphology and syntax are just tools for something else. The "ideal" Latin sequence would be morphology 5th-7th, syntax and some metrics in 8th, and the just lots of text, text and text.

With my kids I had to speed up the process a bit, since they basically finished morphology around 6th, but still, DESPITE the fact they kinda started in K (the stuff I used with them were not much different than the curricula for small kids), and that they're excellent and quick learners, they'll be "ahead" of me only for one year in the end, and they started five years earlier than I started.

 

You just can't "speed up" the process of cognitive development of the child and even with very bright kids (mine are definitely in this category) you can't possibly profit THAT MUCH out of early Latin.

Of course, all I'm saying is from the perspective of somebody aiming for serious Latin, not just morphology. I just think that formal study of Latin can and should wait for a little, while you can of course play with the littles with Latin as much as they want and they enjoy. :)

[Ravin]

We started in 1st with Song School Latin. Next year in 2nd we'll be using Lively Latin, just taking it slowly.

[iwka]

My dd 12 started in August, she takes Grammar I, which is Latin Vocab., Latin and English Grammar.

My dd 6 (7 tomorrow :)) will start Petty School Reading this week.