Review: Latin for Kids with Laurelwood!

If you’re educating classically, Latin is one of those subjects that keeps popping up.  I never studied Latin as a child, aside from a few words in science class, so I’ve been learning right along with the kids.  We’ve memorized some Latin declension noun endings as part of CC, but haven’t dived any deeper into vocabulary.  When Laurelwood offered us the opportunity to review their Latin readers and workbooks, we decided to do a little summer enrichment and go for it!   Laurelwood Books sent us their Olim, Once Upon a Time in Latin, Reader III and their Workbook III.   I did have a hard time deciding which level to choose (out of a series of 6), and finally picked this one because I thought Super D would enjoy the story!

The books are softcover and well-made. The reader contains two stories – The Lion and the Mouse, and the story from the Gospels where Jesus fed five thousand, this one entitled To Feed the Five Thousand.   In the reader, the story is told first in English, and then in Latin.  The reader is full cute illustrations that beg to be colored lol.    Don’t you want to color this cute lion?

During the Latin section of the stories, the sidebar is full of Latin vocabulary words.  I like that the kids are not only learning Latin vocabulary words, but they are also learning a very useful skill of how to look things up and reference a vocabulary chart.

And I LOVE that they are actually reading in Latin!  What a confidence booster!  It can be intimidating to look at a page of text in a foreign language and want to shrink back, totally overwhelmed.   Paired with the workbook, Super D jumped right into translating the Latin words into English.   Each page in the reader corresponds to an exercise or two in the workbook.

This workbook contains 39 exercises, and Super D completed approximately one exercise per day.  With just a little bit of explanation, he quickly understood what to do and was able to work independently.  (Can I hear an Amen! lol).

I appreciate that the teacher’s guide includes notes for the teacher in the front, explaining how Latin works.  Word order in Latin is rather irrelevant, and that can definitely take some getting used to!  It’s the noun endings that explain who is doing the action!

The exercises follow a pattern throughout the book, which makes it easy for the kids to know what to do.   The first exercise in the set asks them to translate the vocabulary from Latin to English, and then from English to Latin.   This part was easy for Super D, because of the sidebars in the Reader. Other exercises ask the kids to match the Latin words to the English ones.  Matching is always a fun game at our house!

The Digging Deeper sections were a little over Super D’s head, but that’s ok.  My goal was to introduce him to the concepts – we’ll dig into it in the high school/Challenge years of CC!

The reader and workbook sets are a great way for our young ones to learn Latin in a fun way!  We’re fans!

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