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Struggling with Latin


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Rebecca is in 4th grade and does LFC B. She got through A fine last year. It is a challenging subject for her. She made a 73 on her last test, and I made her re-study and take it again, where she got a 100. Her test this week was a review test of the previous two chapters - no new material. I assigned her a workload and study time so she could do well on the test. I didn't even score it because she skipped a huge chunk of material. Generally she aces vocabulary and stumbles on grammar. I don't know what to do. She does well in every other subject; I don't think I'm asking too much to give her one challenging subject. I am so fed up that I'm considering making her repeat LFC B next year. Please help me out, what do you do when your kid is having trouble with a particular subject?

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Actually, you may want to move to Latin Alive instead. Latin Alive is a better fit for my daughter than LfC was, it is more geared for how she thinks and learns. I teach myself a few lessons ahead with the DVDs and then teach it to my daughter and a friend. We started in 4th grade. They both did better with it than with LfC.

 

I go at a slow, easy pace. I stop when their eyes start glazing over, generally 20 to 30 minutes.

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Actually, you may want to move to Latin Alive instead. Latin Alive is a better fit for my daughter than LfC was, it is more geared for how she thinks and learns. I teach myself a few lessons ahead with the DVDs and then teach it to my daughter and a friend. We started in 4th grade. They both did better with it than with LfC.

 

I go at a slow, easy pace. I stop when their eyes start glazing over, generally 20 to 30 minutes.

 

 

Darnit. I thought I had seen all the Latin available. Can you give me a link for Latin Alive?

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Latin Alive:

 

http://classicalacademicpress.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=14&zenid=a008797a3d8d91c01b26768ed9661a3e

 

I enjoy her DVDs. The vocab is largely based on cognates, which is the way my daughter, her friend, and I think and learn vocabulary easily. The grammar is a bit tough but she explains it well. A strong language arts student can handle it in the 4th grade.

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Actually, you may want to move to Latin Alive instead. Latin Alive is a better fit for my daughter than LfC was, it is more geared for how she thinks and learns. I teach myself a few lessons ahead with the DVDs and then teach it to my daughter and a friend. We started in 4th grade. They both did better with it than with LfC.

 

I go at a slow, easy pace. I stop when their eyes start glazing over, generally 20 to 30 minutes.

 

 

So will it take you more than a school year to finish it? How quickly have they been putting out new books?

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At our current pace, we won't even finish this year. But, we may speed it up later on. They have put out a 2nd book, each book is easily 2 years worth of work for an elementary student. I would think you could go straight into Henle or Wheelock from book 2. I have not purchased book 2 yet, but have looked at samples.

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We do Prima Latina and Elementary Greek ... so I may not be on the same page as you, BUT I wanted to offer this thought:

 

We take a week off from the lessons every 6 weeks or so to spend time with memory- declensions, vocab, memory verses, etc. I found that after such a week my kids were really ready to go on. Maybe you could try that for a bit before making her repeat the whole book?

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Just popping in to share my thoughts. 3Blessings has a really good point about reviewing. I often find it does the trick. LFC began to annoy me after a while b/c it doesn't include enough practice that makes the student work with the vocab and grammar, and some kids (like my Dd) really need it. I know they put up some sample exercises on their site and they were great, but once we got done them I was on my own. I was designing my own extra practice and I got fed up with it.

 

Ds used LFC A and some of B. He went right into Wheelock's without a problem. For Dd I dropped Latin, but I was considering picking back up with Latin Alive b/c I have a suspicion the concepts may be more fully explained and practiced--though I haven't taken time to look yet.

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We are doing LFCB this year, and dd has been struggling. I backed up a few weeks ago and had her conjugate all the verbs and decline all the nouns and look them over weekly. She is doing so much better at the translations now. It takes us longer to get through a lesson, but I think getting her mind in the practice of conjugating and declining has made a difference. I am planning to switch her to Latin Alive for next year.

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