A Little Rebellion Every Now & Then

The thing I’ve reluctantly concluded is that you’re just not ’supposed’ to do classical education if you’re not a fundamentalist Christian who wants Christ at the center of absolutely everything. All right, maybe it’s not that bad, but as someone who wants to start Latin early - first grade - it’s a bit difficult to find an appropriate program. So I bought Prima Latina on sale, and I’m working on modifying it.

First things first, I’ve started nosing around for things to memorize that would replace the prayers. I haven’t come to any decisions, but I have a few resources, at least.

Tonight, I went through the vocabulary list in the back of the book and fixed it. I added macrons where appropriate, and added in definitions where I thought they’d been too narrow - i.e. caelum as ‘heaven’ rather than ’sky’ or ‘the heavens.’ I’ve printed that out, as well as their alterna-pronunciation guide with the instructions for classical. I’ll tape that over the in-book guide in each book.

Tomorrow - or later - I will use the ‘corrected’ vocabulary list and go through the text as well as the teachers’ manual, adding macrons and definitions where appropriate. I also will be going through the flashcards, sorting out the appropriate ones for Prima Latina and adding macrons to them. A bonus, if you will, from getting the flashcards is that I have a ready-made preview of the vocabulary in Latina Christiana, and I can work steadily on them throughout next year. Finally, I’ll come up with something cute for the first couple of lessons (which cover pronouncing Latin), and print it out to cut out and tape over the in-book stuff. Whew!