Latin Club Week 11

This is a class report for week 11 of my Latin class at Homeschool Out of the Box co-op. Our textbook is Latin for Children Level A from Classical Academic Press.

Meet and greet. There was no quiz! Chapter ten was review, so we had a review day today. I gave everyone a stamp who attempted the monstrous crossword, and they all shared war stories about how awfully difficult it had been.

Songs. We sang our usual songs. We were missing some people, but managed Dona Nobis Pacem as a round anyway. Since we missed a week due to the storm and I am recovering from losing my voice this week, I don't think we're going to be able to swing another song. But there's always next semester!

Translation: We worked on Adeste Fideles and tried translating from the Latin to our own English interpretation. It is hard! We learned that a literal translation is almost incomprehensible in English. What I want the kids to take away from this whole exercise is an understanding of how different Latin really is. When they are studying Spanish or French or German, more closely related to English, they can expect to translate each word and then read it off. However, in Latin it doesn't work that way. It's going to be a long time before we learn enough about word order and the various tenses and moods and whatnot that we're able to really confidently translate it. The best we could do at this point was to get an idea of what the verses meant, and you know what? That's pretty good! The high point of this part of the lesson was when the kids realized that videbemus is a future form of video. That was some smart thinking.

Stamp: Today's stamp was the "surprise" sum chant and everybody got it! Very well done.

Games: We played Hot Seat today since the children were so well prepared, and we had a new champion in the hot seat: Stephen got his first Hot Seat Sticker today and he was very proud! Well done! Must be the flame retardant underpants.

Virgil: This week we worked on lines 3 and 4 in the Aeneid. This is very very hard work, and not to be taken lightly. Here is a link to a page where the lines are read properly, and also a translation is read -- it happens to be Dryden's translation, which is one of the ones we'll be looking at in Aeneid class next semester. By listening to the recording, the kids will be able to see what I was trying to get across in class -- that the line breaks do not necessarily coincide with the pauses. It would be great if they could listen to this a few times, so they can hear the rhythm of the words, independently of how they're arranged on the page.

Homework: Chapter 11 is aboute adjective endings. The good news is that adjective endings are the same as noun endings, so this is kind of like another review chapter. The big new concept is matching the adjective to the noun in gender, number, and case. A noun only has one possible gender, but adjectives have three. This is going to take lots of practice, and I suggest asking them to pair one adjective with multiple nouns of your choice. The homework is chapter 11 in both primer and activity book, and the chant will be the adjective endings chant, which is basically all three of the noun endings chants in one.