Jenny in Florida
01-12-2009, 07:54 PM
There. I did it. I admitted it. Right out loud.
Here's the thing: My son really liked Latin when we did Minimus. And he loved Learning Latin Through Mythology. But we've done those, and there doesn't seem to be a good next step in that reading style. Everything I've looked at is just too big a jump for him.
We really like the Galore Park English series, so we thought we'd try that for Latin. It started well, but my son quickly bogged down. I can, of course, "make him" do the work, but it became clear that he wasn't really absorbing it. We had somewhat the same experience with Latin for Children earlier in this process.
At some point over the final six weeks before the holiday break, we just stopped doing Latin at all. He got very busy with dance and choir committments, and then my daughter was home from college and we just went into crisis mode, doing only the basics and keeping up with the online classes each week.
So, I had already decided to slow Latin down to half pace and do just the first half of the GP book this year. Then I had some in-depth conversations with my son about how school was going (not great) and what we could do in planning for next year to make things more interesting for him. What we ultimately decided was to streamline the number of subjects and let him tackle more challenge in each one. (Up until this year, his preference has always been to do a lot of easier things.)
And Latin is a casualty of that decision. He started Greek this year and really loves that. And he will continue Spanish. But he voiced a very strong preference for dropping Latin. Once I absorbed that, I decided it was just plain silly to try and pick up this late in the year, "catching up" and doing only half of a book we knew full well wasn't going to get finished next year.
So, there it is. We're Latin drop-outs.
Whew. I feel better!
Here's the thing: My son really liked Latin when we did Minimus. And he loved Learning Latin Through Mythology. But we've done those, and there doesn't seem to be a good next step in that reading style. Everything I've looked at is just too big a jump for him.
We really like the Galore Park English series, so we thought we'd try that for Latin. It started well, but my son quickly bogged down. I can, of course, "make him" do the work, but it became clear that he wasn't really absorbing it. We had somewhat the same experience with Latin for Children earlier in this process.
At some point over the final six weeks before the holiday break, we just stopped doing Latin at all. He got very busy with dance and choir committments, and then my daughter was home from college and we just went into crisis mode, doing only the basics and keeping up with the online classes each week.
So, I had already decided to slow Latin down to half pace and do just the first half of the GP book this year. Then I had some in-depth conversations with my son about how school was going (not great) and what we could do in planning for next year to make things more interesting for him. What we ultimately decided was to streamline the number of subjects and let him tackle more challenge in each one. (Up until this year, his preference has always been to do a lot of easier things.)
And Latin is a casualty of that decision. He started Greek this year and really loves that. And he will continue Spanish. But he voiced a very strong preference for dropping Latin. Once I absorbed that, I decided it was just plain silly to try and pick up this late in the year, "catching up" and doing only half of a book we knew full well wasn't going to get finished next year.
So, there it is. We're Latin drop-outs.
Whew. I feel better!