Latin was once a very common language. Then it grew up, moved out of the house, had a bunch of kids, and now we really only use his grandchildren in the modern world.
However, understanding Latin can help us understand English vocabulary, sentence structure, case endings, and more! (And if you then learn Spanish, German, Russian, etc., you'll still see Latin's fingerprints everywhere you go).
I teach Latin using two curriculum:
1) "Sentence Village" is a curriculum I wrote when I taught 5th-12th grade Latin at a school. It uses an analogy of a village with six families (made up of boys, girls, and rocks) that all work together to hire nouns and make sentences.
While it sounds very 'elementary-age' (and that age does love it!), it's also very useful at any age. The analogy ties together what parsing means (and how to do it) in a way that is much simpler than traditional textbooks and yet still has all of the same depth.
To put it in perspective - I have 3rd graders parsing effectively by the end of the first hour and loving it. By the first or second class they are also doing sentence diagramming! So I'm in the middle of publishing it at some point but you get it now :).
2) Lingua Latina. This is a chapter book written entirely, 100%, in Latin. We use it alongside Sentence Village because it allows children to read pages of straight Latin - while learning vocabulary, sentence structure, and so on without even trying - while still using my system to do the 'deep' work of parsing and diagramming. It's been a beautiful synthesis.
Homework is generally composed of reading Lingua Latina combined with a short workbook that fill out with the help of Sentence Village.
Recommended for 4th-12th grade (though it helps if they already have a basic understanding of what a noun, verb, adjective, etc. are as well as a noun being a subject, direct object, etc.).
If we have enough students we will split the class into more distinct age groups.
* This course is currently waiting for additional students. Please
contact us if you are interested!
