The Latin-Centered Curriculum

beginning in third grade, but I know quite a few people who have done Aesop A successfully with 2nd graders. I plan to use it with my dd next year at a slow pace. She'll be 7.

The only real consideration with starting early is that if you power through the lower levels too quickly, children may end up out of their depth if they're trying to do the upper levels at an unusually young age. The content and level of analysis required may be too much for them.

However, the nice thing is that even if you exhaust the models that CW provides for you, the method allows you to choose models of your own. That means you can continue to practice the exercises, at the same level but with new models, pretty much as long as you want or need to. A child who is not ready for, say, Diogenes, could continue to practice Homer skills for an extra year without running out of things to work on.

-Drew

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"I wonder how far I shall carry any opinion with me when I plead for active effort to revive the general use of Latin?" - Hilaire Belloc
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First you need to look at the age and ability of your child . Right now we are using Writing Tales ( www.writing-tales.com ) with my 10 and 8yr old which follows the same progymnastmata approach .
The first thing I say if you plan on using this method with a young child I wouldn't start until you have advanced half way through 2nd grade OR you have an advanced 2nd grader like I do . With that said even with those qualifications you still need to preceed slowly .
Writing Tales only currently has 2 books which by the end of Writing Tales 2 your child would be ready for Homer . So it is the equivalent of Aesop A ( WT1 ) and Aesop B(WT2 ) .
You also don't want to frustrate your child . These programs start off easily enough but advance very quickly . You will definitley get better works of writing from a 4th grader then you would with a 2nd grader .
My suggestion is to look at this criteria when looking at a young child and doing these programs . If your child is just a natural writer. They have mastered handwriting , meaning they can properly form their letters and complete them neatly . Then if they walk around writing their own stories . You look at them and see sentences but they need refined and punctuation . That those sentences make sense . That your child can write comfortably . Of course most boys develop later in this area then girls do . There is always the reverse where some girls have difficulty writing down their thoughts and some boys don't . It just depends on your child . If you have a child that has difficulty with just the whole concept of handwriting I wouldn't proceed with Aesop either . But continue using Copywork , and even on the Well Trained Mind board Susan has written Writing With Ease which is geared towards the young child 1/2nd grade and follows the same format . I would recommend this before proceding with Aesop as well . Of course some families teach typing and really doing this by dictation and having the child copy what you wrote ( from their words ) is not recommended in the requirements of Aesop or Writing Tales or any other progymnastmata approach . Unless you have an older child that is dealing with learning disabilities .

In conclusion I would say , if you think your child is ready at this stage . As each child is different and you know your child best . Take it mighty slow , and keep those expectations that its going to be more work on your part to get those juices flowing to get those sentences out of them .

I hope some of what I mentioned here has helped .

Tracy
Mom of 4 girls 10,8,5,21 months
Using Calvert 4 ,3 ,, Prima Latina , and Writing Tales 1

Tracy
Mom to 4 girls 10, 8 , 5, 21 months
www.thereedfamily-blog.blogspot.com