Chapter 4 - Rap

Theresa Ambat raps her way through Chapter 4.  Dowload, share, and enjoy!

National Latin Survey

Let your (Latin-loving) voice be heard!  Take the National Latin Survey:
http://www.nationallatinsurvey.com/

LLPSI: Study Guide

This site has been re-organized to help make everything, particularly the new resources I am adding, easier to find and use.  The tabs are now arranged roughly in the order you are likely to use them when studying a new lesson in LLPSI.  So, if you are following my recommendations, for each new lesson you would navigate the tabs in the following order (from left to right):

1.  LLPSI: GRAMMAR LESSONS

(30 minutes) Participate in the grammar conversation for your lesson.
(10 minutes)  Complete the grammar worksheet for your lesson.

+ LLPSI: GRAMMAR SONGS
(5 minutes) Sing the song for your lesson (if available).

+ LLPSI: GRAMMAR KEY
(5 minutes) Use the systematic grammar key to check your work on the grammar worksheet.


2.  LLPSI: CONVERSATIONS
(30 minutes) Participate in the conversation for your lesson.


3.  READING TUTORIALS
(5 minutes) Watch the reading tutorial for your lesson.
 (30 minutes) Read (and re-read) the lesson in the LLPSI text.


4.  EXERCITIA TUTORIALS
(5 minutes) Watch the exercitia tutorial.
(30 minutes) Complete the first two exercitia for the lesson.


5.  LLPSI: CONVERSATIONS
(30 minutes)  Re-read the lesson (and/or participate in the conversation again).
(20 minutes) Complete the remaining exercitia.


Each of the numbered items should take roughly one hour to complete.  On this schedule, you would complete one lesson in one school week.

For the last lesson of each chapter, the 'grammatica latina', you will need to remove the introductory grammar lesson and add Pensa A-D toward the end.  Therefore, your last week of a chapter would look like this:

1.  LLPSI: CONVERSATIONS
(30 minutes) Participate in the conversation for the grammatica latina lesson.

+  READING TUTORIALS
(5 minutes) Watch the reading tutorial for the grammatica latina lesson.
 (30 minutes) Read (and re-read) the grammatica latina lesson in the LLPSI text.


2.  EXERCITIA TUTORIALS
(5 minutes) Watch the exercitia tutorial.
(30 minutes) Complete all the exercitia for the lesson.


3. [PENSA A-C] [NO TAB]
(30-60 minutes) Complete Pensa A-C in the text.


4.  PENSUM D
 Watch the Pensum D tutorial and complete the Pensum D worksheet.

+ TRANSLATIONS
Re-read text with audio translation.  

+ LATIN - LATIN FLASH CARDS
Study flash cards.

I hope these instructions and my new resources will make your study of the Latin language more efficient and productive.

Latin Father, German Mother

As you all know, 50% of the English language is Latin, in spite of the fact that its origin is German.  Only 40% of our English words are now derived from our ancestral Germanic language (the language of the Angles, the Germanic tribe from which we get the name of our language, Angle-ish.)  You also know that almost all (90%) of the ‘big’ words in our language (3+ syllables) are Latin (9% are Greek and 1% are ‘other.’)  Because the Germanic words are the ‘little’ ones, they are also the ones that we learned in school and at home before the 3^rd grade.  In this way, German was our ‘native’ tongue, because we learned it first.

However, around the 3^rd grade we began to learn a foreign language, Latin, often without even knowing it.  Our classes became more difficult.  Our texts became more challenging.  We started learning ‘bigger’ words.  The percentage of Latin in school continued to increase every year until we graduated.  If we went to college, the percentage of Latin and Greek words in our texts far outnumbered the Germanic ones.

It’s as if you grew up with immigrant parents, a mother from Germany who dropped out of school after the 3^rd grade and a father from ancient Rome with a Ph.D.  When you came home from the hospital, your German mother noted that her plump little baby was quite ‘fat,’ while your educated Latin father noted your ‘corpulence.’  Your mother wrapped you in a blanket covered with images of ‘horses,’ but your father doted on you swaddled in your ‘equine’ print.  Your German mom bought you a mobile with little blue ‘birdies’ while your father praised her for the azure ‘avian’ acquisition. 

As English speakers, we need to recognize the roots of our language.  We learn a predominantly German language in our youth, and as we mature, our language patterns shift toward Latin.  However, many parents continue to treat English as ‘English’ (i.e. German) for all twelve years of formal schooling and never teach the Latin grammar, syntax, and vocabulary that predominate after 3^rd grade. 

Every student of English should also be a student of Latin from 3^rd-12^th grade.  And that does NOT mean a student of Latin ‘roots,’ but a student of the language.  Memorizing a list of 100 common Latin and Greek roots is NOT the same as learning Latin.  By the 12^th grade, students should know around 3500 Latin words by having actually learned to read them.  In doing this, they will have increased their college-level vocabulary by more than 35,000 words.  It is no wonder that students who have studied even one year of Latin score 50-100 points higher on the SAT than their counterparts.

There are many fantastic Latin programs for parents who know absolutely no Latin but want to give the advantage of learning Latin to their children (for one such program, Latin for Children, see one of my earlier blog entries.)  If you see the competitive advantage of learning Latin, get out of your comfort zone and give it a try.

-Joe Klomparens

Latin Windsprints

You might enjoy the following post from Doug Wilson regarding the benefit of learning Latin (my thanks go to David Byle, a missionary in Istanbul, for sharing this with me.)

The Brain Is More Like a Muscle Than a Shoebox (or Why It’s Good for Kids to Learn Latin)

Posted: 24 Sep 2012 11:00 AM PDT

“If a football coach were making his player run wind sprints in a particularly hard practice, no one would upbraid him for making his players run from the thirty-yard line to the forty-yard line and then, mindlessly, pointlessly, back again. If he were confronted, he would point out that the issue was discipline and not the particular piece of ground the players were covering. In fact the ground covered in the subsequent game is not important in itself either but is related to a higher end.

“We tend to think of our students’ minds as finite shoeboxes, and we then think we must take special care not to put anything in there if we do not want it to remain there for life. But the brain is more like a muscle. A student who learns one language, such as Latin, is not stuck with his shoebox three-quarters full, with no room for Spanish. Rather the student has a mind that has been stretched and exercised in such a way that subsequent learning is much easier, not much harder.

“Now of course this kind of mental discipline could be acquired by requiring of the students the intellectual equivalent of running back and forth. While a football coach might be able to get away with this, because everyone understands the point, we should not attempt it in the classroom—although mental wind sprints that had no point in themselves would still be better than simple laziness. The reason this approach would not work in the classroom is that the human mind is inescapably teleological; it wants to know why it is learning something. Latin has the advantage of providing the grist for the mill of the mind, while also providing great practical advantages. To return to our metaphor of football, the study of Latin is therefore simultaneously an exercise to prepare for the game and part of the game.”

—Douglas Wilson, The Case for Classical Christian Education (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2003), 140-141.

Delayed Gratification

Human beings are hard-wired to seek instant gratification, from the plaintive cries of an infant at his first hunger pangs to the toddler screaming at the grocery checkout because he wants the candy “now!” to the adult buying his lottery ticket in hopes of striking it rich.  We want what we want and we want it now.  Instant financing, no-interest/no-payments for six months, lines of credit, and pay-day loans.  The desire for instant gratification is the root of many evils.  It leads some into drugs.  Others, into alcohol abuse.  Others, into divorce.  Others, into perversions of every sort.  Therefore, as a parent who wants the best for my children (and who must battle my own desire for instant gratification), one of my primary jobs is to teach my children to delay gratification.

The ability to delay gratification, not differences in wealth, is what distinguishes the upper and lower classes.  And by class, I mean differences in culture, not money.  The hard-working poor who saves what he can and invests in books rather than beer (not that a good beer is anything to avoid, but you know what I mean) will not be poor for long.  As a parent, I want to train my children to delay gratification.  I want them to be wealthy in knowledge and culture and to avoid the many pitfalls of instant gratification.

One method I use to accomplish this is education, and particularly the disciplines of math and Latin.  I’ll let others speak to the benefits of math in helping students delay gratification, but I say that Latin is its brother in this cause.  Studying Latin is a long-term investment, not a get-rich-quick scheme.  It is popular in upper-class, wealthy, elite schools precisely because of this.  The parents who invest in those schools know that knowledge is built slowly over time, like a good investment, and that the interest from a student’s long hours of study now won’t be withdrawn until much later.

I saw one example of this in my home last week.  My children were on dictionary.com taking an online vocabulary test as they prepared for the SAT.  The test was timed and gave you a ‘rough’ (I’d say very rough) estimate of your personal vocabulary.  My 10-year old, after 2 years of Latin, knew about 15,000 words, while my 14-year old, after 6 years of Latin, knew about 40,000.  When I scored 50,000+ on the test (I’m sure my children will surpass me in the next few years), I noted that almost every word was based on a Latin root and that my knowledge of Latin made the meaning of even the most obscure word quite clear.  Why?  Because college-level vocabulary tests don’t check the little Germanic words everybody has learned by 3^rd grade.  No, they test the ‘big’ words.  And what are the ‘big’ words?  90% are Latin.  9 out of 10 words on the big three, the SAT, ACT, and the GRE, are LATIN words.

So, the payoff for Latin, the increased understanding of English grammar and vocabulary, is built slowly over the 12 or 13 years of formal schooling.  Of course, the improvement is evident after just weeks of study, and one year of Latin is better than none, but Latin is like a good mutual fund that needs time to accrue interest.  For those who want to get rich quick (but actually live in poverty), Latin is not for them.  For those who are ready to learn delayed gratification and build for the future on a solid foundation, Latin is the lime in your concrete.

Latin for Children

As most of you know, I am a Latin teacher at a public high school and a homeschooling dad for my seven children.  Over the last 12 years I have experimented with many Latin programs for my children at home and for my high-school classes.  The short list of texts I have purchased and taught includes Rosetta Stone: Latin, Artes Latinae, Latina Christiana, Cambridge Latin Course, Ecce Romani, and Jenney’s Latin.

After all those curricula, I settled on Lingua Latina per se Illustrata by Hans Ørberg for my high school classes.  For grades 6 and up there is nothing better if you really want to learn Latin (and not just memorize some vocabulary and a few charts.)  However, for my children at home I had not found a program that would serve as adequate preparation for the rigors of LLPSI, that is, until this year.

This year we adopted a program called Latin for Children at our homeschooling co-op.  This program is the perfect complement/prequel to the LLPSI series for a number of reasons.  It offers a complete course of study for grades 3-5 (i.e. there are three levels) and after finishing Level C students have a solid foundation in grammar (all major noun/adjective/pronoun declensions and six active verb tenses) and vocabulary (720 common Latin words).  All of this is taught in the traditional American order (nom., gen., dat., etc. for nouns and amo, amare, amavi, amatum for verbs) which students are likely to encounter in college, so by studying Latin for Children and LLPSI, students will know both the American and European noun/verb systems.  Students also have a choice of ecclesiastical or classical pronunciation throughout the program.

I advocate a balanced approach to learning Latin, using the grammatical method to train the brain in ordered, logical, and systematic analysis of language, and using the natural method to develop long-term memory, vocabulary, and depth of understanding.  Children in grades 3-5 are naturally going through the “Grammar Stage” of learning, so Latin for Children is perfectly suited to them.  Around 6^th grade students begin to enter the “Dialectic Stage,” and the constant inferences required by LLPSI is perfectly suited for them.  LFC and LLPSI complement each other well.

LFC helps make learning permanent with many creative games, songs, and activities.  The songs for the declensions are catchy.  I love using Lyrical Latin and Latin Verbs Rock in my classes, but the LFC songs are as good or better.  The video lessons add a lot of humor.  Dr. Perrine has a great sense of humor and it shows in the videos (particularly when he takes his children’s toys and parades them in front of the camera in a spaghetti western meant to teach verb conjugations!)  On the website there are many learning games (very professional, very entertaining) which correlate to the chapters.  There is a card game (it comes with the learning bundle) to reinforce vocabulary.  The activity book includes crosswords, puzzles, word searches, and many other fun opportunities to practice what the students have learned.

I’m so glad that I found Latin for Children.  I believe it completes my Latin program and gives my children a solid foundation for a lifetime of learning.  You can learn more about Latin for Children on the Classical Academic Press website (www.classicalacademicpress.com). The learning bundle includes all of the materials described in this review.

As a homeschooling dad, a Latin teacher, a Classics major, and a graduate student in Latin and Roman studies, I can say unequivocally that the Latin for Children series is in a class by itself.  If you are considering Latin for your children, you will find no curriculum more thorough, more professional, more rigorous, and more fun for students in grades 3-5.  –Joe Klomparens, homeschooling dad and National Board Certified Teacher