Latin I Class Notes -- Week 1 (August 29)

Greetings!

Welcome to Latin I.  We had a great first day in class.  I'm glad to be back in class at CHAT and working with some hard-working homeschool students.  Though the set-up at Grace is different, it seems to me that students are doing well with the change.  I anticipate a great year.  

I started out the class by handing out the syllabus and talking about organizing their notebooks.  An important part of this class will be staying organized.  Learning a new language includes learning vocabulary, keeping points of grammar straight, doing homework assignments, and writing out translations.  Keeping track of the papers will be an asset to them.

After going over the syllabus, we started into our book, Ecce Romani.  I like this book because by engaging some deductive reasoning and working together, the students can start translating right at the start.  We started with Chapter 1 -- Two Roman Girls.  Sentence by sentence we translated the Latin into English.  I'm really proud of how hard they worked during this first week of class.  The plan is to do a chapter a week, with Review weeks inserted after chapters 7 and 12.  

This is the first of my weekly e-mails to the parents and students for my Latin I class.  I'm also experimenting a little more with some technology pieces for this class.  We used a projector for a PowerPoint presentation of the Latin text during class.  In addition to the weekly e-mails, I'll be using 2 more online resources:  a blog (http://chatlatin1.blogspot.com) and Dropbox (www.dropbox.com)  On the blog I will post the content of the Class Notes e-mails, copies of any handouts, video lessons, and posts with any interesting information or links related to our studies.  Dropbox is an online document storage site, and I will have all of the handouts available there.  I will also send as attachments any papers handed out in class.  This may seem like a bit of overkill (having information in 3 places), but since I've been doing this I haven't had any instances of missing worksheets, etc.  You will be getting an invitation to join the Dropbox folder for Latin I.  I recorded  a lesson in which I go through a sentence by sentence translation of our first story.

Their homework for the next week:

--  Read p. xii - xv

--  Set up notebook with dividers (categories are on the syllabus)

-- Copy vocabulary as it appear under the story

--  Exercise 1c (p. 5)

-- Worksheets for Chapter 1

--  Derivatives Worksheet