I feel silling even asking, but how do you use Caesar's English?

[Virginia Heather]

I keep reading rave reviews but am left wondering... how do you use it on a regular basis? Do you simply read-aloud the text portions to your kiddos? Is there any writing involved? Do you create games or exercises on your own, or is everything needed for maximum gain contained w/in the text itself? I love the idea of learning roots & word origins (as opposed to simply memorizing lists), but please tell--- day in and day out, how do you use it??

[Paige]

We read it and I had DS look up and write the definitions for all the words in the synonyms list that he didn't know. There's also some quizzes and stuff in the back that I would give him every other week or so. We spent 1 week per chapter because DS would get too bored reading too much in one day and I think too many words at once would all turn to mush in his head. We also keep a vocabulary notebook. We'd write the main vocab words for the chapter and their roots in the notebook and every day we'd review it. I'd just give him a word and he'd give me the definition. We've been keeping the notebook for a few years (not just for Caesar's English), so it is pretty big now. I don't review every word and root every day.

[Chrysalis Academy]

Oh my, we love Caesar's English!! We use the Enhanced version, so the lessons are longer. We do one lesson per week, over two days. First we do the cumulative quiz (provided in the TM) over all the stems and words learned so far. Then, we start on the lesson, reading it out loud. The way we do it is that I read all the words in regular font, and Miss P reads all the words in italics, caps, bold, quotations, etc. It sounds kinda silly I know, but it's fun for us - we both have to pay attention to read our "parts" and I like it because I know she's reallly paying attention and following along, rather than daydreaming while I read. We do about half the lesson each session, but that's not rigid - when we start to get "full" we just close the book for the day. It works really well.

 

So far we're doing everything in the Enhanced CE except the word searches, and I don't think we'll do the writing exercises either. Between Paragraph Town and WWS we are getting in plenty of writing. We do the sentence anaylsis in CE though - just iding the parts of speech in the sentences - because it's good review and reinforcement for the grammar in GT, which we did last spring.

 

I love the new CE. I really, really liked the old CE too, but for me it was worth it to spend the extra $$ for the new one. It really rounds out our LA study, and feels quite robust.