Considering Latin Programs, part 4

Latin for Children by Classical Academic Press

Key Facts:
3 levels currently with another in the works
Cost: Text $21.95, Key $9.75, DVD $54, Activity book $16.50, and History Reader $9.75
Vocabulary: 240 words per year
Pronunciation: Classical (DVD) or Ecclesiastical

Thoughts based on online samples:
The text is nicely laid out. I like having all of the explanation in the student book instead of relying on a separate workbook. The only concern I have about the explanation is that it covers several things in a relatively small space. This tends to make me think that the DVDs would be a good investment to make sure that the material is covered twice to increase comprehension. The online DVD sample is great even though it took a couple of hours to download on my slow internet connection. After watching the lessons on the DVD, I actually think that I could teach the lessons myself; however, since the memory cds are only sold bundled with the DVDs, I'm stuck buying both to make sure my pronunciation is correct. I think Jessie might find some of the chants a bit fast, but we can always slow the pace down and do them together. Jessie also looked over my shoulder at the activity book online samples and thought it looked like fun as well. I'm glad to see that she's interested. I thought the variety of activities in the sample looked not only fun but also useful in reinforcing the material. The idea of the history reader interests me. It looks like a good way to practice some translation. Looking at the answer key, it's not the most interesting reader I've ever seen, but it is for beginning Latin students so it's probably all they can handle.

Thoughts based on reviews and posts:
Most of the feedback on Latin for Children seems to favorable from both parents and kids. The most common complaints are about errors in the book and the book not matching up with the DVD. These problems should all be fixed in the newest versions of the books and DVDs. The general consensus seems to be that both moms and kids like the DVDs although the reviews would have been for the earlier version. The format has changed somewhat as the teacher is no longer sitting at the table teaching a couple of students but is now teaching directly to the camera. A group of kids goes through the chants to start the lesson. The reviews for the history readers are a bit more mixed, probably because the sentences are a bit dry.

Final thoughts:
While I'm still trying to get my mind around paying close to $100 dollars for a Latin program, I think that of all the programs that I have looked at so far this one will do the best at meeting our family's needs in a Latin program. I think the format is fun and interesting enough to engage Faith's interest and keep her from groaning when it's time for Latin. (Who knows, it may even make Latin a favorite subject here like the Rainbow Resource review claims.) I like the way the material is presented both in the DVD and the student text. The pace of memorization seems reasonable to me, and the built in review weeks are definitely a plus for us. That's one decision made for next year. Hopefully, the others choices will become obvious to me as well as I prayerfully work my way through them trying to figure out the plan that God has for our family.

Considering Latin Programs, Part 3

Latin's Not so Tough by greeknstuff

Key Facts:
6 levels available
Cost: workbooks from $12.95 to $22.95, CD for first 3 levels $8
Vocabulary: unknown
Pronunciation: classical

Thoughts based on online samples:
Level 1 and 2 would be great for someone trying to start a child into Latin early on. I think Jessie would need to start at level 3. The program does look easy and fun. It would probably be great for a child who is intimidated by Latin. I did like the looks of the translation exercises. That said, I think the pace is a bit too slow for us. There seems to be more fun but less meat to the program than others. Four years seems like a long to cover the material they have presented.

Thoughts based on reviews:
I didn't find much information about this program on the wtmboards. There is a review by Susan Wise Bauer located here that isn't very favorable.

Final thoughts:
I think I would prefer a more traditional approach to teaching Latin that would facilitate the transition to a higher level text at a later point.

Lively Latin

Key Facts:
1 level to last one year
Cost $55.00 nonrefundable to download the beta version plus color printing cost

Thoughts based on online samples:
The samples look colorful and fun. The explanation are clear and understandable. The progression seems a little bit slow to me.

Thoughts based on reviews:
There are plenty of questions regarding this program on the wtmboards. All the reviews and feedback that I have seen has been positive. Here are a couple of the more extensive reviews that I have found from the wtmboard
and Paula's archive.

Final thoughts:
My first concern about this program is that I can't really tell how much vocabulary is being learned. While the program sounds like a lot of fun, I also find the nonrefundable price to be a negative. Not only do I have to spend $55 just for a book, but then I also have printing costs on top of that. I also dislike having to use the internet during school time because of our slow connection so I'm not to thrilled with the idea of having to go online each lesson to listen to pronunciations. I think we'll have to pass on this for now, although I'll keep it in mind if we have trouble getting another program to work.

Considering Latin Programs, part 2

Latin Primer by Canon Press

Key Facts:
5 levels available: 3 primer levels followed by 2 grammar levels
Cost: Student & Teacher text $13.75 each, DVD $55, Cassette or CD $8, could probably find used since the program has been around for awhile
Vocabulary: 350 words in year 1
Pronunciation: classical

Thoughts based on online sample:
My first thought based on the table of contents for the teacher's manual and the student manual which I found at christianbook.com are that the layout is a bit disorganized. All of the vocabulary and chants are in one section, worksheets in another, and lesson plans or a few miscellaneous things like crosswords in the case of the student text are in a third. This would require a lot of flipping back and forth each week just to cover one lesson. The excerpts of the text I found only showed the vocabulary lists so I don't have any idea how the worksheet pages are set up. It is a shame that the publisher doesn't have better samples available on their website.

Thoughts based on reviews, posts, and/or comments:
Latin primer received mixed reviews on Amazon with some families who love it and some families who hate it. The latter thought it was expensive for a program of just memorization or considered it drudgery. Since the program is mainly memorization, I don't really see the need for the DVDs. I did find one post on the wtmboards where the mom simply used the texts and CD which would be a cost saver. I am a bit concerned that there is little to no translation work.

Final thoughts:
It was much more difficult to find information on this program than some of the others. My impressions are 350 vocabulary words seems like an awful lot to cover in one year especially since the text is set up with 27 lessons and no review that I can see. With mainly just lists and worksheets, I don't really see a lot of room for variety and fun to help peek Jessie's interest. While I do think memorization will probably be the bulk of any curriculum at this level, I would prefer to see a bit more explanation to put the memory work in context even if it must be a bit simplistic. I think there is enough of a variety in programs out there that I can safely mark this one off my list.

Considering Latin Programs, part 1

Latina Christiana by Memoria Press

Key facts:
2 levels available with Henle recommended to follow
Cost: Text set $32.95, DVD $48, supplemental game/activity $17.75 (based on Rainbow Resource 07-08), could probably find some materials used
Vocabulary: 10 words/lesson or 250 per year
Pronunciation: ecclesiastical

Thoughts based on website sample:
Student text contains no explanations, just vocabulary, declension or conjugation, and fill in the blank type exercises. This would mean require Jessie to question me for anything that she forgot or didn't understand instead of being able to try to look it up on her own and figure it out first. Teacher text does contain lesson plans, but based on the sample I'm not sure there is enough information for me to pick up the manual and go. It would most likely require some teacher prep time on my part in addition to working ahead through the book to be more comfortable with the material. The sample chapter didn't include a lot of information on the grammar being taught, and outside the lessons there are only 2 pages of grammar overview in the book. This tends to make me think I might need to purchase the DVDs. It would be nice if they had an online sample so I could get an idea of the production quality and the teaching style of the instructor. The Ludere Latine book sounds interesting and might make Latin a bit more fun, but again unfortunately I couldn't find any online samples.

Thoughts based on reading posts from WTM boards:
As far as the program goes, some posters seem to be very happy with the program calling it a solid foundation and a good no frills program. Other posters who dislike the program tend to have older students (10+), complain about memorization with lack of explanation, consider it dry and boring, or would like to see more components like readers along with the program. The DVDs also received mixes reviews. Moms who love them think they get the job done, do a better job at explaining the material than the book, or have kids who enjoy them. Moms who hate them take issue with the instructor's accent, stuttering (new version has better editing for this), and mispronunciation of terms and either can't stand the DVDs personally or have kids who loathe them. I can't find any specific information on the Ludere Latine book.

Final thoughts:
While this program would probably work fine for Jessie as a solid Latin foundation based on what I could find online and our experience this year using Prima Latina, I don't believe it will get her or me for that matter excited about learning Latin. Not having explanations in the student book for Jessie to refer back to previous material (which she does sometimes in Prima Latina) is a major drawback to me. Purchasing the book set, DVD, and activity book would bring the cost up to $98.70 from Rainbow Resource putting the cost on par with most of the other programs out there. This probably won't be my first choice in a Latin program, but I feel confident that if I can't find another program that I like better that this one would be fine to fall back on.

Week 15: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

OK, I confess. We didn't do so well in the schooling department this week, but to be honest I'm just glad that we managed to get the basics done. Monday morning was the third day in a row Benny woke up with a 103+ degree temperature. We crammed in some school work and then headed to an 11am doctor's appointment. I intended to finish up school when we got home, but by the time we waited for a chest xray (no pneumonia), an albuterol treatment (to help his breathing), and got his prescriptions filled (eating McDonald's in the van while we waited), I was too tired to even consider more schoolwork. Wednesday I had a doctor's appointment, and Thursday we ended school early to decorate the Christmas tree because I promised DH that I would have the empty decoration boxes ready for him to put away that evening. Friday, I gave the kids some extra free time to spend with DH before he left very early on Saturday for the beach to go fishing with some of his friends. Falling by the wayside this week were geography, history, art, music, and preschool. Here's what we did accomplish.

MATH
Jessie now officially likes metric units better than the standard US units of measurement. She breezed through the metric part only to get bogged down in the US units converting yards, feet, and inches. Getting math done for her this week was more a measure of perseverance (at Mom's insistence) than of actual math ability. I do want to make sure that she memorizes the basic conversions between units this year. I'm not quite sure if I just want to make it part of memory work or buy a simple workbook with some more practice to cement the facts that way. Violet, on the other hand, has been setting new records this week in the category of quickest math lessons ever while working through her word problems book. We did a chapter a day of 20 word problems in under 20 minutes with almost no mistakes. The one thing I love about review is that it shows me how much she has learned so far. I can remember her struggling with similar problems last year when she was working through the 1A series.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Spelling did get done for both girls this week. For memory work, we reviewed what was already in their boxes without adding anything new. For copywork both girls copied the poem My Gift this week. Jessie did manage to get in her Latin lessons. On Friday, we realized that we had forgotten to do CW Aesop all week so we did the entire writing project in one day including a key word outline, a rough draft, revisions, and a final draft (located on the left). This time in revisions we not only looked at spelling and punctuation, but I also suggested that a few of the sentences could be rewritten a bit differently. (She has become the queen of prepositional phrases lately.) We rewrote together one sentence that contained the word that three times, made another sentence a bit more concise by taking out unnecessary phrases, and revised a sentence with the work there appearing in it twice. Jessie seemed to be very open to the suggestions and did not take them as criticisms. My goal would be that by the end of the year, I could simply ask, "Is there another way that you could write this sentence that would make it more clear or concise?" and have her be able to suggest an alternative without my prompting.

So that's about it for the week. I was going to end with before and after pictures of our Christmas tree, but DH packed the camera away Friday before I remembered to get the after picture so I'll come back next week and add those in when the camera's back.

Thinking about next year, part 1

This is probably the first year that I have begun planning for the next school year in December; however, I've decided to start for 3 reasons. First I want to put an overall budget in place for next year so that means I need to estimate how much I spend on school. Second, I'm also hoping an early jump start will give me time to either find what I need used or come up with my own curriculum instead. Third, I feel like we need to make a few changes in our curriculum choices so I need some research time.

4th Grade for Faith
Math: Singapore is working well for us so we'll just continue on with year 4. Jessie is looking forward to only having one math program next year.

1. Singapore Primary Math 4A Textbook ($7.95)
2. Singapore Primary Math 4A Workbook ($7.95)
3. Singapore Primary Math 4A Intensive Practice ($7.95)
4. Singapore Primary Math 4B Textbook ($7.95)
5. Singapore Primary Math 4B Workbook ($7.95)
6. Singapore Primary Math 4B Intensive Practice ($7.95)
7. Singapore Primary Math 4 Challenging Word Problems ($7.50)

Total cost for math: $55.20

Language Arts:
Spelling: Spelling Workout is also working fine.

1. Spelling Workout F ($15.50)
2. Spelling Workout G ($15.50)

Grammar: Jessie is doing fine with the Rod and Staff grammar; but even though she's getting the exercises, it's not translating into the rest of her work. I also don't see the need to continue grammar through high school, so we'll research some alternative ideas here. (cost to be determined)
Writing: I definitely want to stick with the progymnasmata for writing. We could just continue with CW Aesop. Although I found the student manual and instructor manual helpful this year in understanding how to implement the program, I believe I could make my own lesson plans and avoid the cost of the Aesop B student and instructor books. The one drawback to CW is that it doesn't seem to have a plan to get through all of the stages of the progymnasmata. I think I'll revisit my research here before making a final decision. (cost to be determined)
Handwriting: I already have the paper for next year. We need to transition to dictation. I'd like to actually schedule out the dictation in advance so I'm not scrambling for something the weekend or night before the assignment. ($0.00)
Literature / Reading: We'll stick with library books here. I'll need to do a better job of prereading and scheduling the books in advance this time. I'd like to add in some enrichment activities or book reports here. Need to research the best way to do this. (cost to be determined)

Total cost for Language Arts for now: $31.00

Latin / Foreign Language: I don't really have anything against Prima Latina, but I can't say I'm thrilled with it either. I'm definitely going to do some research on Latin programs before deciding for next year. I'd really like to get back into Spanish as well. I have an old copy of the Learnables Spanish, and the demo cd of Rosetta Stone. I think I'll try those with Jessie again before starting to look at other program options. (cost to be determined)

History: I'm happy with the way TruthQuest is working for us this year despite a bit of disorganization in my planning. I think we'll continue with it next year. I'll try to get AHYS 2 in early spring so I get a head start in planning this time.

1. TruthQuest American History for Young Students 2 ($28.95)
2. TruthQuest American History for Young Students 3 ($28.95)

Total cost for history: $57.90

Science: I'm really leaning towards starting science up in January rather than waiting until summer because I know once the baby is here I'll be able to come up with dozens of reasons why we can't do science today. I already have Apologia Botany which we have yet to get through, and Apologia Zoology 1 which we haven't tried yet. We'll give zoology a try and see if the girls enjoy it before I consider buying any more science books. I do need to get in some planning very soon though to start in January. (I guess that gives me my project for next week while DH is at the beach). (cost to be determined)

Art / Music: We're still struggling with art here. I just don't think I have enough art experience to use Drawing with Children. We'll need to explore some options for art. We have yet to do any art appreciation in our homeschool. Next year would be a good year to start working on this. Then in 5th grade we could link our art appreciation with our history cycle again. More research. What music we've done this year has gone well. Both of the girls enjoy the Classical Kids tapes and the Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists. I guess next year we'll try to finish all of the resources our library has in this area. I also want to find something to teach the girls some of the different musical instruments with music so they can hear the different sounds. A bit more research needed here as well. (cost to be determined)

Hmm... I may need to estimate next year's budget based on what I spent last year for my budget. I have a lot more things to research and think about than I expected when I started this post. Well, at least now I know what areas where I need to spend time researching, and I can start looking for used math, spelling, and history books.

Week 14 in Review: Settling Back In

We spent last week slowly working back up to our regular workload. We only took two days off the week off the week of Thanksgiving, but apparently a four day weekend is enough to completely erase the notion of morning routines and school schedules from the girls' minds again. Every time they finished an assignment I gave them, they were both convinced that it had to be their play with Benny time. (Although Benny didn't mind being so popular in the least). I need to tweak the schedule a bit anyhow to give Violet a full hour to work on her math. Hopefully I'll find some time next weekend after the Christmas decorations are up.

MATH

For the most part Jessie has worked fairly quickly through the section on length. We covered converting between both meters and centimeters and meters and kilometers. The only hitch came Friday when I left DH in charge while I went to my OB appointment. He apparently taught Jessie to add and subtract the kilometer and meter combinations by writing two columns, one for km and one for m. Unfortunately Jessie had a breakdown when she needed to subtract the meters but the second number was larger than the first. Serves me right for not explaining it myself before I left (although those McDonald's Cinnamelts I stopped for were definitely delicious). Jessie has one assignment left on Monday before finish her Intensive Practice book. She's still a little iffy on subtracting larger numbers, but her confidence is definitely going up with the review work.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Spelling is moving along fine for both girls. Violet decided that she was going to learn our newest poem, My Gift by Christina Rossetti, before Jessie. At the end of her afternoon quiet time on Tuesday, she emerged proudly to tell me that she had finished memorizing the poem and recited it for me. Needless to say Jessie was a bit taken aback to be beaten by her younger sister and had the poem memorized the next morning when we pulled out her memory box. I'm not thrilled with all the competition between the girls right now. I suppose I could assign them different poems to memorize, but part of how they memorize is to tell the poems to each other outside of school time anyway so I'm not sure it would help. At any rate, I don't think we'll move on to any new poems immediately. Both girls have some catch up to do in their Bible verse memorization for church. We only managed to read Little Pilgrims Progress one day last week, but I do hereby pledge to finish the book up next week even if it means reading it for the bedtime story. In CW Aesop, Jessie read the legend "A Laconic Answer". It's the first unfamiliar story we've done in CW so far. It will be interesting to see how the writing goes next week.

GEOGRAPHY / HISTORY

For geography the girls completed Indiana and Iowa booklets. They have been singing the Fifty Nifty United States Song with each other. We'll try to get back to adding on to that next week. In history, we read in the Truthquest manual about the beginning of New Hampshire and New Netherlands (New York). I didn't have all of the books checked out from the library that I wanted to do for the week, but we did read the book Sarah Whitcher's Story on Wednesday and Thursday. It was my intention to do some booklets for their history lapbooks on Friday until Benny plopped himself in my lap and declared that he wanted to snuggle. He was interested in playing, reading, or even following DH around the house so I took his temperature and sure enough he was running a fever again. So lapbooks and map work will have to wait until next week.

ART / MUSIC Still on break.

BENNY'S PRESCHOOL

I had enough difficultly motivating the girls and keeping them on task this week that Benny's preschool fell through the cracks again. I did manage to pull down the box of letter magnets and add G, g, H, and h to the refrigerator. Benny was quite happy to match them up for me. Since the H and h were new, I pointed to the big H and had Benny say, "Big H," after me. As I pointed to the little h, he went running for the living room to find DH and called, "Little h," back over his shoulder. Oh well, we'll try again next week when DH is back at work and hopefully Benny is feeling better.