Big Book of Lively Latin

[Guest kate3]

Thoughts on Big Book of Lively Latin?

[FloridaLisa]

We like it. Little to no teacher prep, pick-up-and-go, enjoyable, plenty of exercises to extend and practice the lesson, history is woven throughout, not overly demanding yet sufficient to teach Latin in the younger/middle years. I used it with my 4th - 6th graders, finishing up this year at 5th - 7th. LC I and II was dry and boring in comparison.

 

HTH,

Lisa

[SophiaH]

Have you done a search of the boards yet? There are a lot of threads on Lively Latin. You'll probably get the best results by doing an advanced search for lively Latin and limiting it to the K-8 board.

 

Or, if you've already read past threads, whadya want to know?:)

 

I'm using it with dd8. We are enjoying it and hoping that LL2 gets done before we need it in the fall.

[Guest kate3]

I like everything that I have read about LL but am wondering if I need all the history in the same text. We are not in a year that we will study Ancient Rome and I am not sure I want to add it along with our current history study. How much a part of the curriculum is the history and will it work without it?

[Jen in PA]

We are doing it without using the history right now, but I'm planning to use the history material at some point in the future. It works just fine without using that portion.

[Saille]

It works fine without the history, but the history is high motivation material for my kids. They love the stories, and I think they serve to connect the kids to the language itself through the remarkable people who spoke it. There's not that much history to do, honestly. It's not time consuming, just a nice break from grammar exercises.

 

I love the BBoLL. But I've posted that elsewhere, so I'll hush.

[Allearia]

We were working on Lively Latin as we had spent two years on the Ancients and lots of ancient Rome so ended up skipping most of the history. It is very easy to just separate out those pages. It looks great and we might go through the history at some point but we were sort of done with Rome at that point.

[SophiaH]

The history portion, as others have said, is not integral to the program. However, I think it serves a very important purpose within the curriculum: it breaks up the more intense grammar and vocabulary portions. That means a couple of things. First, we go over our chants and vocabulary and do flashcards every day, even on the days we are "only" doing history. So, the history days stretch each chapter out a couple of extra days to really get the chants and vocabulary down. Also, because learning Latin can be very challenging for a young student, lighter history days keep things fresh and give the feeling of lightening the load.

 

Not to mention the cultural and historical benefit of keeping the ancients close. Meaning that even in the years that we're not studying ancient history, the Romans are our constant companions. I feel that we will be very prepared for a high school study of the Great Books and Authors after so many years of familiarizing ourselves with their history and culture. This is important for *us* because of the future educational path we hope to travel; however, you may have a different path planned and therefore, studying the ancients so closely may not be an objective you need to meet your educational goals. Consequently, you could skip the history in Lively Latin and not miss a beat...