Lively Latin.

I'm guessing it took us a year and a half to do Lively Latin.

We did take a bit of a break last summer--and that was a big mistake. We lost our momentum and, in retrospect, I can see that we forgot an awful lot as a consequence. We probably could have made it up with extensive review, but I didn't know to do that. The program also doesn't have extra excercises and I found that a problem from time to time.

My students were a 10-11 year old boy and a 7-8 year old girl. We started with one lesson and excercise per day. We did the history whenever it came up. (Some days it was the only way my son would do Latin. He loved the history, the actual Latin, not so much.) We sat down at the computer and recited the vobaculary sheets every single day (well, 4-5x/week). (I encouraged the kids to say the English after saying the Latin).

I also made up vocabulary bingo cards--here's the site I used. I'd write the Latin on the bingo card and then call out the English. (You could also make some up in reverse). We'd use M&M's or chocolate chips for markers. They love it.

The flashcards with the program are useful--IF you keep up with them and start sorting them into nouns and verbs (and later, adjectives). Once you have the nouns--colour coding them by declension would have been a fantastic thing for us to have done. (In fact, I think I will do just that next week. I want to do some solid review before we carry on.) Once you have verb endings and declensions to memorize, set up a drill sheet. I "borrowed" mine from someone at the WTM boards. I think it may have been Cajun Classical. I used the one called "sum" 2x--once for the three tenses of sum, and one for the three tenses of all the other verb endings. The second sheet is for the noun endings.









Here was our daily procedure.

A. 1) Send one child to the computer to do current vocabulary sheet.2) Have second child fill out the drill sheets. Switch.

B. 1) Read Lesson out-loud, together.
2) Do excercises together. Use vocabulary sheets as necessary. If it's history, I just had the kids take turns reading out-loud. We did whatever there was to do as follow up. We did not do the History booklet. However, if I were to do this again, I would have purchased the Greenleaf guide to The Famous Men of Rome. The course uses this book and The Story of Rome to provide the history sequences. If we had, we could have simply used this as our history for the year and I would have been well satisfied and less stressed.

We really should have taken a day and dispensed with the vocabulary at the computer and done our Vocabulary Bingo more regularily. The course also provides games and my daughter was the only one who played them. (I couldn't get them to work for a while either. I just kept downloading Java until, one day, mysteriously, they worked.) Her grasp of vocabulary is much better than my son's.

The course does not hold your hand and as a novice, I missed that. However, it was interesting, varied, and solid. The kids don't hate Latin. For all that, I gladly gave up the hand-holding.