The Latin-Centered Curriculum

I try to have my kids do their grammar chants every day; and vocabulary chants, if they need them.

At the Prima level, since things don't seem to be sticking, I'd do a few minutes of chanting and review every day. Make a game out of it.

Recitation only takes a couple of minutes, but it works so well for retention!

For the most part, we have divided the LCI work into three parts:

1. Forms are recited every day. (She runs around the kitchen island with a new word for each step: her idea, but whatever works.)

2. Vocabulary is also reviewed every day, but words graduate. After the first week, a word which is identified quickly and accurately moves up to the twice a week pile, then the weekly pile, then the every other week pile, and finally to the monthly pile. We have about 180 cards in the monthly pile at this point and 12 of them were demoted this month. (If she misses one at any point, it gets demoted back to the daily pile - if she is slow to answer a monthly one, it gets demoted to the weekly pile.)

3. Grammar is introduced as suggested in the teachers' manual and is reviewed on an ad hoc basis.

All of the above is oral only. For written work, all we are doing is the exercises in the student book; she does one letter worth each day. She is also learning the prayers, but that is not a big part for us (in part because she picks them up fairly easily if we give her a few weeks to do so).

We do a new lesson most weeks, but we are happy to pause and not move forward for a week if it seems like a good idea for whatever reason.

We used the DVDs at first, but have not touched them since lesson 5. (We are on lesson 20 now.) We will not get them for LCII. For reference, she is eight.