Latin- chants

[lulalu]

We are 3/4 of the way through Getting Started with Latin. I have Keep Going lined up next. 

I have noticed that other programs have children chant verb forms. (Maybe other things as well?) Does chanting help with learning? Is it just for the purpose of memorizing? Do you chant just the Latin or do you say the English followed by the Latin. 

Has chanting helped your dc learn Latin better? Am I missing a big part of Latin learning by not requiring chants? 

[ScoutTN]

Yes helpful. 
My Dd did two years of kid Latin (SSL, GSWL, LfC) and got in the habit of chanting from the CAP curricula.

Then she did two years online with CLRC. Chanting again. 

[HomeAgain]

Ds would rather pull his eyeballs out than chant like in LfC.  Remember the scene in Addams Family Values when the camp starts singing Kumbaya?  Yeah, my kid was Wednesday Addams looking at the LfC dvd.  Absolutely horrified.

For him, sing songy repetition wasn't going to work. I made blank verb charts and he would write the forms in.  He'd underline the endings.  He'd draw connections between singular and plural forms.  Every week, 1-2 blank charts filled in.

There are a lot more ways to interact with the work than chanting.

[ScoutTN]

Clarifying: Dd did not like chanting. But it worked. 😉 When I was no longer the teacher, she had no way out. 😆

[cintinative]

We used the Classical Conversations songs to learn the endings before we started Latin for Children, so we just continued with those. My problem with the chants for LfC is they all sounded the same.  (ETA: we only did CC for one year).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBiAaQzQJI8  1st through 5th declensions

I'm having a hard time finding anything for the verb endings. Part of the problem is they don't post their audio online.  Here is a girl singing them (but some of the tunes are off from what I remember and I'm not 100% on her pronunciation either).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE0s2IWEekw

ETA: here's another with some mnemonic devices also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qniIz5qsF7Y

 

Edited October 11, 2021 by cintinative

[LauraClark]

Ds10 actually likes the sing sing memorization type things. We are using this for noun declensions right now:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PBiAaQzQJI8

[2_girls_mommy]

yes, chanting, sing songy memorization of charts and lists works for Latin and just about anything else.  My sister and I can still sing the list of English helping verbs our teacher had us memorize in middle school.  I sing english verbs to the tune of the old song, Sara Sponda the way my English teacher taught us back then.  She had classes of middle schoolers singing loudly, "Sara Sponda, Sara Sponda, Sara Sponda  Lie, Lay, Lain..." day after day all year long to memorize irregular verb forms.  It worked for us and it worked for my kids.  I love Rod and Staff English because if you follow the daily oral lessons it has you have the kids memorize lists of all kinds.  I just used the tunes in my head that my amazing middle school teacher used with us.  I came up with my own tunes for teaching Latin or other lists in other subjects for my kids.  A certain chanty pattern came to us as we memorized English kings or the books of the Old Testament that I now use a decade later with my youngest because they are cemented in my head after doing them for a year or two each with the olders.  

I don't know what tunes that particular curriculum gives you, but use them or borrow others, or make up your own tunes.  But it will help them memorize it.  I think about it like the ABCs.  I still sing the ABC song partially to myself in my head if I am looking something up in the dictionary to find the right page as I look at the letters to decide if I flip backwards or forwards in the book, lol.  Having that tune in my head is instant recall for alphabetical order that I have had since I was perschool aged. 

[lulalu]

Thanks! GSWL doesn't have any chants or songs to go with it. So I will have to piece my own together. I think we will take a week or two just to work on memorization. DS is doing well and enjoying it, but we are both getting a little stuck on a few of the endings. 

[HomeAgain]

44 minutes ago, lulalu said:

Thanks! GSWL doesn't have any chants or songs to go with it. So I will have to piece my own together. I think we will take a week or two just to work on memorization. DS is doing well and enjoying it, but we are both getting a little stuck on a few of the endings. 

One thing that helped here was creating little mnemonic devices.

The pronoun 'we' uses US at the end.

"you' has S, "y'all" has TIS (same S there!)

'he/she/it' has T, "they" has NT (same T there!)

 

For things that ALREADY happened (imperfect), we see 'bA' in there.  For things IN the future, we see 'bI' in the word.

 

We highlighted and underlined the beejeezus out of this as I had him write blank charts.

[lulalu]

5 hours ago, HomeAgain said:

One thing that helped here was creating little mnemonic devices.

The pronoun 'we' uses US at the end.

"you' has S, "y'all" has TIS (same S there!)

'he/she/it' has T, "they" has NT (same T there!)

 

For things that ALREADY happened (imperfect), we see 'bA' in there.  For things IN the future, we see 'bI' in the word.

 

We highlighted and underlined the beejeezus out of this as I had him write blank charts.

Thanks! Great ideas.