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Is GSWL really that great or is it just the next shiny thing for me?


grantmeawish
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I am planning for 3rd grade. I want to start latin this year and am trying to make it easy on myself and just follow SWB's reccomendations. At first, I thought PL for sure, but as I was researching it, I saw all these other curriculums. I don't think I want all the extras that LL has. We just want to get it done. I want my son to learn Latin for the purpose of grammar, writing etc. I feel like I should trust SWB recs on this, but something diiferent (GSWL) and shiner is pulling me away! Anyone else been through this?

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I happen to love GSWL like nothing else, because it was a very good fit method-wise (okay, and in price too) for my daughter and for me. I do not yet know if it will be a good fit for my son, but we will try it next year. But I really felt like we got some very solid Latin instruction from it, and it was fun, too.

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Yes, GSWL really is that great. Too bad it's so short-lived. GSWL is one of the few materials I have used that I can recommend without any reservation or caveat whatsoever.

 

As for SWB's recommendations, lots of programs weren't even in existence when WTM was last updated, and as Boscopup mentions, WTM contains only a sampling, food for thought.

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I really, really like GSWL and A. tolerates it (he's in 2nd grade). It feels old-school to me (I like old-schoolish things): clean pages, simple presentation, easy to work through, sensible, no wasted effort. And it's pretty inexpensive.

 

It is also flexible enough to adapt to a student's interest/aptitude. You can work at the student's pace, you can crank it up by doing the English-to-Latin translations as you go, you can extend it by doing one round through the book Latin-to-English and then a second English-to-Latin, you can easily augment with something like SSL or Minimus or you can do it straight up.

 

It is entirely possible your student won't love it, but hard to imagine that it wouldn't do a good job of teaching her. At our house it is sort of like handwriting practice: a bit of a chore to A., but occasionally he is extremely pleased with what he produces; and the incremental progress really adds up.

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Yes, GSWL really is that great. Too bad it's so short-lived. GSWL is one of the few materials I have used that I can recommend without any reservation or caveat whatsoever.

 

:iagree:

 

The simplicity of it is genius. I plan to use GSWS eventually, too. I wish more things were designed like this!

 

Jackie

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Yup. It's awesome. And inexpensive. For $20 ($10 on a Kindle!), you get a worktext WITH answers AND mp3 files of the author going over each lesson with correct pronunciation. Written FOR homeschoolers, not re-worked from a classroom text. How cool is that?!

 

Totally worth it's shiny-ness in every way. ;)

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Y'all have sold me on this! And can't beat the price. What are you using/recommending after GSWL?

 

 

I'm stretching GSWL over 2 years (3rd and 4th grade - doing Latin only a couple days per week, which is probably heresy). Then my current plan is to move to Latin Prep, from Galore Park. We'll do Latin more days per week then. ;)

 

I got the Kindle version of GSWL. It's easy to use electronically, since each lesson is usually one page, maybe 2. You have the brief lesson material where it introduces the new word or concept, then you have 10 sentences to translate. We do it orally. When we first started, we did multiple lessons in one day, but by about lesson 10, I think there was enough interesting stuff to do just one lesson per day. And now, my son's brain would explode if I had him translate another 10 sentences. :lol: So it ramps up quickly, yet it stays gentle, only introducing one new thing at a time, and constantly reviewing previous material. It's very well done. When I initially looked at other Latin programs, I had a hard time making sense of many of them, having never studied Latin before. GSWL immediately made sense to me, and now I feel more comfortable moving to something like Latin Prep when we're done.

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We moved to level 3 of Latin's Not So Tough after GSWL and like it too. Level 3 doesn't have much (any?) new grammar in it, but I opted to use it because it has quite a bit of new vocabulary. DD found it to be an easy transition; she finished Level 3 easily and is now on to Level 4 and loving it.

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I'm stretching GSWL over 2 years (3rd and 4th grade - doing Latin only a couple days per week, which is probably heresy).

 

 

 

I'm a heretic too, then! :lol: We do the exact same thing. We are stretching GSWL over 2 years, 3rd and 4th grade, and do Latin only a couple days per week! Though I don't know where to go after this.....

 

 

OP, GSWL is AWESOME. Effective, brilliant, non-intimidating. AWESOME. We have learned sooooo much. As we progress through the lessons, I'm constantly amazed that we can look at the sentences and actually understand them. My daughter just said to me yesterday, "Mom, I've really learned a lot in this book."

 

Also, I saw on the website that Mr. Linney (the author) is creating a downloadable lecture series to follow GSWL. He uses an ancient book called The First Year of Latin. His lectures aren't complete yet, but here is the info in case anyone is interested:

 

http://www.linneyslatinclass.com/

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It is the BEST! We tried LL and LfC and neither worked. It just didn't stick. GSWL was freaking amazing. He got it. I got it. Something about the method just stuck. We went through it in about 24 weeks and then moved to Galore Park's Latin Prep I. The beginning is mostly review with a few new vocab words. The only thing we're having issues with the fact that the cases are in a different order in LP, than they were in GSWL, but they gave us a funny little way to remember them and it always makes Indy giggle, so that's good. LP is also pretty funny in its own quirky British way. As much as we like LP, we both really miss GSWL. I wish he would write follow up books.

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We love it here too! It is easy, enjoyable (my boys love to diagram the English translations), and gets done. We are going to go into LfC A next year, mostly because we like that program too (we had been doing it before it got to be too much and we broke to do GSwL). I'm thinking we will fly through LfC A as much of it will just be review, but I am fine with that.

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Honestly, I think Latin for Children is a *far* better resource. We're learning and taking away much more from it, than we did with GSWL. That being said, GSWL is quite complementary to LfC. But I would definitely use LfC first and just use GSWL as a supplement/review.

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Getting start with French will be released soon. Woohoo! I should brush up on the little I used to know.

 

(Scroll down to see the announcement posted on March 12.)

 

Oh, that is excited! Indy wants to add French (because Greek and Latin apparently aren't enough) and I was wishing they'd come out with a French version. I'm hoping it won't be long before it comes out. Indy really wants to add Arabic (what is with my child?????), so I need them to work on that next. :D

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