I've been teaching at Immanuel Lutheran School for one month now and I have tweaked so many things just within a month: discipline, order of the day, procedures...the list goes on. I just wanted to share a few things that I decided to do differently with teaching Latin to third graders.
Repetition is very important when teaching third grade and so applying this to Latin is essential. In the mornings we used to go over only the memory verse for the week but now we also go over the Latin chants as well. This gives them extra Latin practice even if they don't have Latin class on that specific day.
This brings me to another important element of Latin: Chants and more Chants! Latin is the language of music and so a Latin paradigm (such as the first declension noun endings) can become easy to memorize when it has a "sing-songy" element to it. Young students also love chanting. They memorize through chanting and singing with great ease.
I am using the Latin for Children Primer A textbooks and from using these in past years I have found that some chapters should be learned before others. For instance I have my students learn Chapter 4 before Chapter 3 because Chapter 3 is heavy on grammar. They need to learn the "-a, -ae, -ae" chant before they can learn the noun jobs for the different cases. Through a year or so of experience I have found it's better to teach them the meat of something first and then add the seasoning later. The meat being the memorization part of Latin (chants and vocabulary) and the seasoning being Latin grammar.
