Alex loves Latin so much. She’s been flying through her lessons recently. Her new curriculum (Lively Latin, which I keep meaning to review) deserves much of the credit; it’s fun, varied, and colorful, but it also takes kids seriously as Latin learners and demands a lot from them.
My one reservation has been that Alex isn’t up to the writing that Lively Latin requires. Her motor skills, writing stamina, and spelling ability just aren’t at the level of the 3rd-6th graders the curriculum is meant for. So far we’ve done everything orally. I do try to make her tell me, for example, which verb endings have macrons in them, but for the most part she’s been learning to read, understand, and speak Latin rather than write it down.
Finally, I’ve figured out what I want to do about it. In retrospect, the answer seems obvious: We’re going to study “Latin spelling” as a separate subject. Instead of slowing her Latin language learning down to the speed of her ability to learn to write it, we’ll just decouple the two skills. One day a week, instead of doing her regular English spelling lesson, Alex will use that time to practice the spelling of the Latin words she’s learned.
We started today. For the first time ever, Alex actually suggested that we do spelling rather than wanting to do everything else first. We spent 10-15 minutes at the whiteboard working on nouns of the first declension. She didn’t do perfectly – regina isn’t spelled “ragena” – but she did pretty well. In this picture she’s declining the noun silva, silvae, f. – forest.
?
I guess it’s not a good time for the graffiti scene from “Life of Brian.”
*snicker* She’ll appreciate it more once she’s learned a little more grammar. It’s a million times funnier to me now that I’ve worked my way halfway through what’s typically covered in a high school Latin I course.
She is starting to know enough Latin to get some things, though. I was so proud at Christmastime when she asked “What does gaudete mean?” and then partially answered herself: “It must be a command to more than one person.”
For anyone not aware of Mary’s reference:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAfKFKBlZbM
have you tried typing on the computer?
Siobhan, we have, although she gets rattled by the letters not being in order. It wouldn’t help with the Latin, though, because she’s supposed to be filling in worksheets and they’re not set up so that you can type on the PDFs.
Does your way of declining nouns skip the vocative?
Also, decoupling the spelling lessons from the rest of it is brilliant. I don’t know why that doesn’t get done in second-language classes more often.
Hobbitbabe, it does skip the vocative. I picked up a tune for chanting the declension endings from a different children’s curriculum, and that one skips the vocative too. I don’t know what Alex will do if she wants to apostrophize “O forest…” I’ll have to drop an e-mail to Magistra (the curriculum author makes herself available that way) and ask her why.
Hm, I checked in the college text that I’m using myself, Wheelock’s Latin. It teaches the vocative for the first and second declensions, but not the third through fifth.
The vocative is almost always the same as the nominative in any situation you actually want to use it.
Yeah, I suppose it doesn’t make sense to use up an extra line to learn in every single declension, in order to recognise Et tu, Brute someday.