Options for Teaching Children

Does anyone have experience in teaching Latin to young children? If so, what did you find works?

My child is 6 and is currently in the 3rd McGuffy reader. I’ve looked at some of the materials aimed at children, and I frankly think they are a joke. Young children have excellent memories, and it’d be a shame to spend a year on it to only learn 140 words.

The closest I’ve found to a serious text that’s age appropriate is Traupman’s “Latin Is Fun” series. That said, I wonder if something more inductive (LLPSI, Maxey & Fay, Fr. Most) or something more traditional (D’Ooge) would be more rewarding for him. Any advice or real world experience would be appreciated.

With my 6-year-old, I’m reading from Lingua Latina, asking for her to translate to English for a couple of sentences, and then to go back and ask her to translate back to Latin. She can’t really read even in English yet, so I do everything aloud. She seems to have fun with it.

I am considering adding in Phaedrus or the Vulgate and de-emphasizing Lingua Latina, as I’m not sure that the inductive grammar approach is even necessary for kids who can just soak things in, in contrast to adults. But really it will depend on her interests.

I should probably see about poetry memorization too.

Hi, sorry for wading into this late (have been busy at work). I’ve taught young kids and think it really comes down to your own ability and confidence in Latin.

If you’re not comfortable with Latin yourself, the course will need to do all the work and so starting with e.g. Hands Up Education’s Primary Latin could be a good approach (it’s designed for use without a teacher in mind):

https://hands-up-education.org/primarylatin.html

The course after this in the series is Suburani, which would be too mature (in themes) for young kids: slaves getting tortured etc. You’d need to move to something else.

Also, kids respond well to gamified learning (Quintilian talks about this, giving kids ivory letters to encourage them with spelling) and so e.g. Duolingo’s Latin course is not very idiomatic but could be a useful add-on, if it gets the kid engaged (that’s the main thing you want at this age I think).

If you are more comfortable with Latin, you can mix it up with different materials and supplement with conversation at home, adapting the materials (the start of Cambridge Latin Course seems optimised for this usage: kids can easily make up sentences to describe what’s going on in different rooms at home after a chapter or two).

I also found it helpful to engage kids by creating videos using a movie-making app that came on the computer. You can supplement this with some Roman history (I’ve taken lots of videos of Roman history online and edited out the gruesome bits using the movie-making app).

What I’ve found is that the method you expect will be best turns out to be boring for them, and what you least expect will work well sometimes resonates. I was surprised when young kids responded better to e.g. Peter Jones’ Learn Latin (which gets into the old-fashioned grammar grunt-work) than reading-based courses full of pictures.

It really depends and you need to try out methods until you find the ones that work (for a bit at least, before you reset and try something else!). Also think about what you want the kids to get out of it. If you’re looking to pre-load as much morphology into their young receptive brains as possible, you may find that they end up dropping out later (most kids do); it’s the one who get enthusiastic who continue and succeed, and so that’s what you should look to nurture at this age in my view.

Cheers, Chad

I don’t have any personal experience teaching children, but I think I would use these to teach a child:

  1. Getting Started With Latin: this is gentlest intro to the language I have ever seen and was written for young home schoolers. There are also recordings and other resources to go with the book here.

2 ) The Henle Latin series is popular with home schoolers. The textbooks were published in the 40s and I think aimed at middle schoolers, but there are a lot of supporting materials on the
internet created recently to support homeschoolers.

They introduce only a few words per lesson and I think could be used with a bright child. There are also short stories in the text and little bits of spoken Latin phrases.

Since I’ve found a few potentially useful resources, and this may help others in the same situation, I’ll post them here.

Latin Without Tears by Favell Lee Mortimer - https://archive.org/details/latinwithouttea00picagoog
This seems to start strong, but tries to do a grammar blitz in the 2nd half. I probably won’t use it for that reason, but it at least marks quantity.

The child’s first Latin Book by William Fenton - https://archive.org/details/childsfirstlati00fentgoog
This has an interlinear in the back, with some quantities marked (mainly for accentation), to provide CI. The straight text without interlinear in in the front. I might give this a try.

Latin Primer : A First Book of Latin for Boys and Girls by Joseph H. Allen - https://archive.org/details/latinprimerfirst00alle
Another interlinear approach aimed at children. Quantity is mostly unmarked. It explains more than Fenton’s text.

I’ve been using Familia Rōmāna for almost a year and half with my son, and now we’re at chapter 31. I’m unfortunately not fluent enough to use it in everyday life, and resources in English are useless in my situation.

Also the stories and videos at Legonium might be of interest.

http://www.legonium.com/