Stuck on Second Form Latin

[howiecram]

Late to the party on this one! . I personally took the adult FFL last last summer. Around mid-way through the class I pretty much fell off the wagon. As it turns out my daughter did fine "teaching herself" with the DVDs, new FFL workbook. I did have her do flashcards basically every day and included in her stack the Latin Recitation Flashcards (do you have these?). I did about 1 or 2x a week orally do the drill questions at the back of the answer key. (I just realize, perhaps your child did not do the NEW FFL workbook, but the First Edition?). My whole point here is that I was pretty hands off and she hung in there, but we did not finish the last unit. (2nd Conjugation verbs). I did also realize that the 3rd, 4th and 5th declension were a little rusty. We are moving forward this year with 2nd Conjugation words, but we are also reviewing heavily the 3rd-5th declension nouns.

On my own journey, I realized how genius the program is. In FFL you only do nominative for a good portion of the book. (which gives you LOTS AND LOTS of practice in easily identifying nominative forms). Then, accusative is added in. Anyway, this past summer I signed up for the adult second form class. All the while during the summer I went BACK to FFL and re-did the workbook, quizzes (they come as a download) and wrote out the declensions almost every.single.day. I couldn't believe how "easy" FFL felt, but the review was great and I could do the worksheets very quickly. I understand it may discourage your son to redo all this work, but you might consider a 10 min mixed review everyday and include some of the worksheets as part of this. Also, divide the FFL vocabulary between 5 days and do 1 stack a day, in addition to the new words in SFL.

Lastly, there is a Second Form Adult class beginning next Thursday! I found it incredibly helpful to take the class!!!!! It meets on Thursdays from 3-4:30EST. If you could attend most of the classes, you will really benefit. If you have to miss a few, you can watch the recording before the next class. Another option, if the class time doesn't work is to take it "asynchronously" - which means you always just watch the recording. I do really recommend taking the class live, if you can, but it's still extremely beneficial if you can't "attend". (to find the class, go to the MPOA site and find the "adult" classes).

[enbateau]

I feel like it came out in May or June or this year. It was pretty recent.

[wycheck]

Wow, thanks everyone! Looks like I have another purchase and some work to do. I was hoping to teach myself Logic, but this seems more pressing.

P.S. When did the second edition come out? I bought our SFL last year. I actually bought a workbook for myself, but haven't used it.

[jen1134]

Hi Jennifer.

Thanks for the tip! I'm using the first edition. Is the second ed. workbook compatible with the first ed. videos? I made the decision to stick with Glen Moore when it came time to purchase SFL.

Totally compatible with Mr. Moore’s DVDs 😊

[enbateau]

As far as how I am working through the SFL program myself, I have made it a top priority. I devote about 25 minutes a night to it at least 3 days a week and a block of about 2 hours on the weekend. I have been able to move through it more quickly than my 5th-grader would because I have a firm grasp on the English language and am pretty decent at languages in general. I barely knew Latin existed prior to MP, save that I new Spanish and French were "Latinate" languages that I studied for over 8 years. It's embarrassing that you can get a degree in English (to teach, no less!), excel on the NCTE exam, and not know a thing about Latin. I digress...

I read the TM, write the vocab in a spiral, and look for ways to memorize content. I highlight endings that stick out, create memory tricks, and make notes where I struggle. I have stickies and extra notes on many pages. If I have a question that I can't figure out from reading the 700 pages of material before and after the lessons (just kidding), I call MP and ask...and now I email. Then, I complete all of the workbook pages, every single one. Nothing is wasted, and every exercise has been beneficial. I am starting to "see" those endings as signifiers of case. I don't think that was all set in my mind in FFL. Now, the picture is coming together. Having my own copy of the workbook used to seem like an incredible waste of money. Going to Sodalitas/Teacher Training changed that. Jessica Watson said she has a stack of something like...six?...Latin student workbooks she has completed. If the pros are doing this, the lay should certainly give it a try!

I wish I could speak to the Glen Moore video aspect. I only know that the TM has not changed editions, and neither has the Student Text, so you might be good to go. I would expect that if this is a 100% student-directed course that your child will take a little more time to move through at mastery-level. A cottage school teacher told me that she has students move through the material until they get a 96% or better on each quiz or test. Definitely redo the material and drill forms until it's second nature. That is the level of mastery required of ME before I feel confident moving on. I have a couple of Post-it notes on my bulletin board in front of my desk where it forces me to run through the vocab words I struggle with the most. Usually these are the ones that are so similar. For me, these words are: (sick/ill, field, rough/harsh), heavy/serious/severe, (book, children, free), shameful/disgraceful, the 3D i-stem m/f and n endings, and 3D 2-terminal m/f and n adjective endings. Everything else is review of LC or FFL. There is a surprising amount of review from LC, and so many of the vocab words are easy for me b/c they are actual French words!

My final tip is that the only help I will ever give my student on a quiz or test is this: "What are the two ways to retrieve a word you don't remember?" My student replies: "Does it have a derivative? Is it part of a prayer or Latin saying?"

[pickandgrin]

So I think that's it! Agreeing with enbateau that he needs a complete restart of second form, which I think is only eight lessons going with what you said earlier. If he starts back at lesson one (which is the first of the four FF review lessons), then he will very quickly come back up to speed and find out if he has any holes. It might also feel really great to prove that he knows most of it, which it sounds like he does. The second edition workbooks are completely worth the money! I would also recommend second edition key, and the second edition quizzes and tests. He can keep the first edition workbook to help if any extra practice is needed. The forced parsing in the second edition is a tremendous asset to a student! I'm a huge fan!

If starting back at lesson one feels demoralizing, then another option would be to have him simply take the lesson one quiz and then subsequent quizzes until he hits a wall and needs to review those lessons. Where he finds trouble, he can review there.

He could even plan to do two lessons per week, which would have him up to speed in one month. If he wants to continue into third form in the fall, then the best thing he can do is get a good handle on second form the school year. It's just the beginning, and he has so much time to do so!

(Voice to text, not going back to capitalize everything!)

[enbateau]

Jessica,

No, he didn't just start SFL recently. He started before we took a summer break. Maybe it is a matter of new material pointing out what he didn't internalize earlier.

ENBateau,

How are YOU working through the Forms? That sounds like what I need to do. I feel like I was "exposed" to FFL with my son but that I'm comprehending so much more from FFL because I'm helping my daughter through Latina Christiana.

To Jessica's point, he may need to catch back up after the break. For me, 3 days is too big of a gap. I start losing a lot. Money doesn't grow on trees, but I would highly recommend grabbing a 2nd edition Student Workbook for SFL for him and yourself plus a Teacher Key. Use the coupon code in the newest issue of Classical Teacher to save $5. I can PM you if you don't have it.

Yes, the 2nd edition workbook is compatible with the 1st edition Teacher Manual! This is how I am using it. I did order the new tests and quizzes, because it syncs better on the concepts learned therein, and you definitely need the latest edition of the teacher key, but the Student Text and TM are the same!

[wycheck]

Jessica,

No, he didn't just start SFL recently. He started before we took a summer break. Maybe it is a matter of new material pointing out what he didn't internalize earlier.

ENBateau,

How are YOU working through the Forms? That sounds like what I need to do. I feel like I was "exposed" to FFL with my son but that I'm comprehending so much more from FFL because I'm helping my daughter through Latina Christiana.

[wycheck]

Hi Jennifer.

Thanks for the tip! I'm using the first edition. Is the second ed. workbook compatible with the first ed. videos? I made the decision to stick with Glen Moore when it came time to purchase SFL.

[jen1134]

Are you using the new edition of SFL? It walks you through each translation step-by-step. If he’s using 1st edition, I think switching could be a game-changer for him. We switched my daughter to the new edition of FFL even though she had completed the first 11-12 lessons. She LOVES the updates.

[enbateau]

I'm about where your son is in my own trip through the book.

• The one thing I struggled with in Latin to English translations was figuring out the job of a noun with an ending that could be multiple cases/numbers. A 1D feminine noun ending in -ae could be the genitive singular case (of/possessive case), the dative singular (indirect object), or nominative plural (subject). Teach your student to always find the verb first, parse it and write the initial translation, then see if any of the nouns could be the subject, remembering that not every sentence will have a separate subject (i.e., not embedded as a pronoun into the personal ending).
• SFL loves to have one sentence with an explicit subject, and the next sentence will have the verb with an embedded pronoun. Teach your student to expect this! You can look over the answer key yourself and warn him in advance.
• Teach him to be careful with first and second person pronouns, as vos can be two different options, the 2P-Pl nominative or accusative (subject or direct object). If it does NOT agree with the person & number of the verb, it will exclude it as a subject in the sentence. This "test" helps me greatly. The same goes for the 1P-Pl pronoun nos.
• Make sure he is drilling the selected FFL & SFL grammar form flashcards daily so that those endings really stick out to him. He should start to "see" certain endings (-am/-as, -em/-es, -um/-os as accusative, -i/orum, -ae/-arum, -is/-um, -ūs/-uum, -i/-erum as genitive, then -o/-is, -ae/-is, -i/-ibus, -ui/-ibus, -ei/-ebus as dative). You can scroll through one case in each declension and list off all the endings to start to see the pattern.
• Drill sentence order in Latin. One thing Jon Christianson told me that seemed to disappear in text but become apparent after the reminder is that genitive nouns (and the adjectives that modify them) will come (before or after...usually after) the nouns that they modify. So, the teacher's words (or words of the teacher) would be "verba magistri" because the genitive word magistri is going to be in the same position as an adjective describing the quality of a noun. In English, "of the teacher" would also get diagrammed off of the noun "words" as it answers those adjective questions from EGR: which one? what kind? how much/many?
• Any kid with executive functioning issues is going to struggle with the procedures of translation, so drill, drill, drill procedures. I'm not saying this is the case, but many kids do. Do a few translations together. Which word do we always mark first? The verb! Make sure he is drawing arrows from the adjectives to the nouns they modify. Drill that adjectives of A/S (amount/size) go before a noun and adjectives of Q (quality go) after a noun. Word order will help with the rest. For quizzes and tests, tell him he can write Latin and then English word order for common sentence patterns at the top. English: S-V-IO-DO. Latin: S-IO-DO-V. Sometimes it looks like IO-DO-V (plus all of each word's modifiers) because the pronoun is embedded into the verb at the end. When students know that the first word isn't always a subject, it frees them to see the endings that can take multiple cases and assign its correct job in the sentence.

[pickandgrin]

Ah, so are you saying that he did the first unit of SF In the summer and then took a break and picked back up with the second unit this fall?
In other words, he did not just restart SF from the beginning, right?

[wycheck]

I think we took almost 2.5 years on FFL. I wanted to make sure that he understood and I had another baby in that time frame. He intellectually matured a lot at the end of last school year. He finished FFL and did the first unit of SFL. I can't remember how long we broke with Latin but it was at least 7 weeks.

He had a hard time with translations in FFL, but then made a huge improvement with the last unit-very few errors. He started SFL at the end of last school year and was great. I was surprised at how well he was doing with practically no help from me. I can't remember how he did on SFL Unit 1 test.

I am planning to review for a while. My question is how. I can do oral things, but since he filled out his workbook I would have to type some questions from there (so I had the correct answers). There aren't supplemental pages for each lesson, are there? If I knew I was going to have to review, I could have bought the book that's meant to be used over the summer. At this point, I don't want to wait for it to be shipped.

[pickandgrin]

Helpful info. How was his translation ability at the end of First Form? How long was his break between FF and starting SF? Did he do any review during that time?
How were his translations the first few weeks of Second Form? Can he (or you) pinpoint where it started to go off track? How did he do on his Unit I SF test?
I'm curious it he's feeling a little bewildered by the third declension i-stem nouns and adjectives. It may be that he needs to pause and redo a few lessons to regain confidence. I do recommend you stop moving forward and take a week, or more if needed, to find the trouble spots before moving on.

Please encourage him that it's ok to be stuck. The next job after stuck-ness is to sleuth out the issue and become unstuck which usually involves getting help. That's an applicable lesson for Latin and beyond!

[wycheck]

Thanks, Jessica! He says it used to be easier for him to do Latin to English but now they both feel hard. His vocabulary is good, he gets the endings incorrect. I think if he had a better teacher he'd probably get it. I'm hoping that he can finish this form by the end of the year so he can do an online Latin course next year.