3rd Grade Question

[reginawashington]

Hi all! I am new to Memoria Press, we will be making the switch from LifePac and I have started researching/ordering. My oldest will start 3rd grade Fall 2020. Being new to classical education, we will be starting with Prima Latina even though Prima is for 2nd grade (since this will be our first time experience with Latin).

My question is - when looking at the Latin & Grammar section of the 2nd Grade teacher’s manual sample, they have “English Grammar Practice” listed. Should I get this in addition to all the Prima Latina items? Or would I be okay only getting the Prima Latina items, not getting the English Grammar Practice, and getting the 3rd grade grammar items?

thanks in advance! - Regina

[Michelle T]

In Second Grade the English Grammar Practice abs Core Skills Language Arts will give further practice to the English grammar taught in Prima. The EGP will also review simple capitalization and punctuation introduced in the Copybook program. You are probably fine to go ahead with the English Grammer portion of 3rd grade as it will not be much more difficult.

[tanya]

Welcome, Regina!

I wanted to add that if you want to do 3rd grade as written, you would be fine skipping Prima and doing Latina Christiana, which is also an introductory course. With the help of the DVDs, you and your student would be just fine, even with no background knowledge. It is spread over two years, giving you 2 weeks to master each lesson.

Either Latin course is fine, but I wanted to make sure you understand that you can skip Prima with no problem at all!

Tanya

[reginawashington]

Thank you for the guidance Michelle!

Tanya, I had NO idea! I assumed if we didn’t start with Prima we would both be completely lost. Thank you for telling me that!

[howiecram]

Thank you for the guidance Michelle!

Tanya, I had NO idea! I assumed if we didn’t start with Prima we would both be completely lost. Thank you for telling me that!

I just wanted to tell you that we have done that with my son. We had a weird family situation (we participate in a 3 family co-op). He is 8, but a Sep birthday, so he was going to "just" do 2nd grade. However, we were not doing a Prima class and i didn't want to NOT do Latin with him. I had thought he would just do maybe the vocabulary this year, and then go through the course again including everything. Well, he's shown me that he can do it all! My only advice is that the first couple weeks were rough, because the lessons plans don't give you any time to learn the sounds the latin alphabet makes. They are almost identical, but I wish that for anyone new to MP, there would be a week given to review-learn the sounds. I would consider doing modifying the plan, for your purposes like this. First, read pages vi and vii and teach this on the board. (could be day 1 of your latin lesson) Then (day 2), do this lesson from Prima: https://www.memoriapress.com/wp-cont...ample-2018.pdf Then (day 3) teach the remaining sounds (like soft c before e, i, ae, oe, etc). Now, you can teach the vocabulary! (Day 4). I would actually listen to the CD for the pronunciation on this day. Then, on day 5, I would watch the DVD. Your second week, divide the workbook and review sheets up over the week. I think you will be in a good place to work through the lesson plans as written at this point. I will say, that I believe lesson 4, we took 3 weeks. The review week is scheduled over 2 weeks, but we did not need it for the first 5 lessons, so we didn't "lose" anytime. After that, the 2 weeks per lesson we have been able to achieve. I would just add that make sure you include 5-10 minutes of review. The other thing I did, was add the grammar questions from each lesson as part of that review. The first few weeks, I think he just memorized the answer, but now, by week 10, he actually knows what it means!

I should also note, that I have to work through the workbooks WITH him for at least the first 6 or lessons. We typically do a review for 5-10 minutes and then I have him set his timer for 15 minutes and we just do as much as he can in that time. We have had no trouble finishing it all in 2 weeks with this guideline. We often begin the workbook section with re-creating the desk charts on a white board. We could use the desk charts, but it seems more helpful for me to guide him through creating the chart, using the model noun or verb. He does do the vocabulary drill worksheet by himself (he just copies it from the workbook) and the grammar drill.

Good luck!! I am so glad he is doing LC this year and not Prima!

[reginawashington]

Wow Christine, thank you so much for explaining that! I’m going to save your advice and refer back to it when we start.

My daughter has an October birthday but I think a year younger than your son - she was born in 2012 so turning 8 this year. We started her a year earlier than she would have been able to because of the way her birthday fell. So in public school she would only be just now finishing up 1st grade. Couldn’t do that to her when she was reading at 4 years old ?