Last semester my son started WordUp and absolutely loved the program. He was worried, Is Visual Latin hard?
I started this course knowing I had zero intention of sitting in on these lessons. I even purchased headphones I was that sure. Not that I’m against learning Latin. But I’m at schedule overload this year & I can use the time.
My plan after each Latin lesson is to sit down together and discuss what he found interesting, what he found challenging, and what he enjoyed most. Besides the jokes. A video course is great, but when you don’t have the ‘live teacher’ component … especially for a class a student thinks is already ‘hard’ … there is a little bit of creativity on the parents end.
I realize if I ask him what he found challenging I know I’ll want to follow up again later to check on mastery.
I have the digital version of the class – which means I also have the Course Materials (fill-in-the-blank worksheets) in pdf form. There is no space to track these discussion questions I want to have after each lesson and circle back around at the end of the course. I thought a little “record keeping” for Visual Latin would prove that it’s not as hard as everyone complains. New, challenging, confusing … sure. But not write it off as ‘hard’ and give-up.
We had to rewire my oldest’s vocabulary when he was learning to play guitar.
Every lesson was labeled ‘hard’. He’d feel discouraged and want to quit. I quickly saw we needed to change that behavior of negatively labeling things. We’d correct and say ‘it’s not hard, it’s just new’. Thankfully this attitude helped him to stick with it, for many years, and he loves playing!
Let’s be honest, everyone labels Latin as ‘hard’. I hope we can stick through the course and take Visual Latin 2 as well. But if I can prove what was once thought hard, but no longer viewed that way … that’s a guarantee we’ll be able to continue.
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This idea of documenting the good & challenging parts of learning Latin lead me to create a little Lesson Wrap-Up for Visual Latin.
I think it will be a good place for him to ‘journal’ after each lesson (write down a few things after each lecture, worksheet, & quiz) and we can chat about it together. Then we can review them again once we progress through Visual Latin. And maybe just maybe his opinion of Latin being hard might just change. Fingers crossed!!
I decided to share the download here since I have many Compass Classroom friends who might benefit from this ‘weekly lesson wrap-up’.