Home school families - Is Latin a part of your curriculum?

Question

We are a home school family with three kids. We are in the process of choosing electives for next year. Do you now or have you ever included Latin in your curriculum? If so, does your family enjoy it and have you found it to be of any use? If not, do you have any suggestions for a good academic elective. We already include French.

Answer 1

I am going to wait to introduce it until 6th grade.

Answer 2

Well I am or have never been homeschooled, but Latin is a very interesting and fun language. This is my second year taking it in school and I enjoy it. You can engage in enjoying conversations with your kids on Rome! It's a pretty interesting topic. Also, studying Latin helps to improve vocabulary and studying Latin can help to later learn languages such as French and Spanish, which trace their roots back to Latin.

Answer 3

Instead of Latin, we studied Esperanto. We took a free online course, a personal volunteer tutor would e-mail back and forth with us to check on our assignments. We made out flash cards and would quiz each other, it was fun.  

Esperanto is the most common intentional language created using 60% Latin roots and 40% Germanic. Because it is an intentionally invented language, you can pick it up and learn to speak it fluently much more quickly than languages that evolved naturally.

What makes it most useful is that once you've learned Esperanto first, you are able to pick up other Latin or Germanic based languages much more quickly because you're familiar with the root word meanings.

There are lots of Esperanto speakers, mostly in Europe, you can hook up with pen pals, there are even Esperanto publications and I have heard there are a handful of radio stations that broadcast shows in Esperanto.

If you don't find a Latin program you like, Esperanto might be worth checking into.

Answer 4

we did do it one year. i hated it, and so did my sisters. but i actually got a lot out of it. when i took an anatomy class this semester, a lot of the body was classified in latin, and my rudimentary knowledge helped a lot. It has also helped me in general. If you can find a way to make it kind of fun, maybe doing things like "latin night" and games and things, it would be a really great idea, no matter what the kids age is.

Answer 5

I'm doing latin and french as well. Latin isn't especially useful as a spoken language in today's world. Some would even call it a "dead" language, but it has been useful to me. Your kids will have a much easier time learning other romance languages, as well as learning spelling and vocabulary in English. I would definitely go for it!

Answer 6

I was homeschooled, and although I never formally learned Latin, my parents did teach me what they knew of the Latin that is used in modern words.  (Prefixes, suffixes, etc.)  I found this to be very helpful in figuring out what unfamiliar words mean, especially once I got to college.  I've always wanted to learn more Latin.  So my suggestion would be, if you do teach Latin, put an emphasis on the words that are still rooted in modern English.

My other suggestion would be Spanish, just because there are so many Spanish speakers in the U.S. today.  It can really come in handy later when it comes to finding a job, since many places prefer employees who are bilingual in English and Spanish.  My college Spanish professor actually suggested that Asian languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, will be the wave of the future, since so much U.S. business is affiliated with Asian countries.  However, Asian languages are very difficult to learn... but then again, Latin probably is too!

Answer 7

No, but it is a great idea.

We started with Spanish, but my daughter became interested in Sign Language. We followed her interest and now we study Sign.

Answer 8

We've not included it yet.  But probably will at some point.

From my own experience, it's very helpful in understanding advanced science terms, legal terminology, and medical terminology.  Plus it can help in figuring out the meanings of a lot of English words, including some of the little used words that seem to show up on college entrance exams like the SAT.

Answer 9

We've done two years of it, and are now working through Greek.  We are also learning Spanish.

I studied to be a linguist with an emphasis in ancient languages, and I currently teach Elem/MS/HS Latin at a local co op as a hired teacher.  I've found that Latin has really helped a lot of kids at each level in both verbal and math skills - it's great for increasing vocab and analysis skills as well as for really putting a "face" to English grammar skills.

Honestly, I've had a lot of kids whose parents pretty much forced them to take my class come up and tell me, mid-semester, that it's their favorite class.  I'd like to think it's because I'm a great teacher :-) but I know it's because a number of things are finally making sense to them - they can see the patterns in their own language and the richness of their new vocabulary that they really never saw before.

My son, who is very math and science based, has really enjoyed learning Latin; he actually has a much easier time learning English, Spanish, and Greek because of his basis in Latin.  (He's 10.)  He's also found that some of the more complex concepts in math and science come easier to him now, partly because of the bit of analysis that he's done in middle school Latin.  

I really recommend it.  For elementary and middle school, I recommend Latin for Children http://www.classicalsubjects.com/lfc_pri... ; for high school, I really kind of like BJU Latin for Christian Schools if a student doesn't already have a background in Latin.  It's what I use for my high school classes, and the kids are doing really well with it.  http://www.homeschooldiscount.com/subjec...

Hope that helps!