anyone's children doing latin in state primary

[samanthar]

is so is it a club and what age and what book do they do? many thanks

oh I'm keen on pre course study visit. Marina you can have mt dc for your Saturday morning latin club (you're S London I think?)

I am 1dilemma! Early days yet though
I am hoping to do the Minimus Training Day in November and with everything else going smoothly, start the Club at School in January.
Am really looking forward to it.

Oh, is she doing Minimus or the love it/hate it Cambridge Latin course Batters?

thats good news marina and rosa and batters hope she starts to enjoy it. fwiw if your kids are offered a choice then its worth doing anyway also means you can learn german very quickly as as a german teacher i used to dread lessons where they hadnt done latin and really they just gave up after a year as the grammar was so baffling.

either that or as a german teacher you have to set time aside simply to expain all the grammar and with timetable consrtaints and all the target language only methodology out there you do nnot have this luxury.

thanks for replies very excited to see an idle post i started has had some legs as, as a mn virgin, ws just starting to enjoy participating on the education/travel forums but then was so baffled by the lunacy prevailing on other threads i have been keeping away, though for those that missed it there was jolly moment whilst everyone translated therir online names into latin. i particularly liked the fact that someone said they liked mn as it was a place you didnt have to be ashamed to have done latin, which was how i felt when i found this forum.

as you all not too scary here, please cd someone explain this whole nickname thing. i simply use the same name on various fora but in the light of the furore i can see why noone wants anything approaching their identity revealing. but how if ppl change names all the time are you supposewd to know who to reply to/to whom to reply, and how do i actually go about changing mine

for the record i hated caecilius et al. principally beacuse in 1979 even he had been dumbed down and we had cases ABCD and CD and were in a differnt order to primer style and the vocative was omitted completely

ooh well done, marina! perhaps i will do it one day! you will be my inspiration!

samanthar, re the nicknames last night thing, it was the Mn equivalent of FlashMob - silly but fun, and in the light of all the distressing and speculative threads about the McCann family, a lot of people were trying to express their views that most of such threads contain posts that they don't want to be associated with, or be seen to condone by avoidance.
Quite a lot of regular posters (old and new in case anyone thinks that this is a yawnsome newbies versus old-timers thing, it isn't IMO) had just had a basinful really and have been avoiding Mn.
But more generally people tend to stick to their usual handle - I do anyway and choose something that they are OK with - whether it is connected to their RL name or entirely different.
Hope that makes sense. My name comes from the Shakespeare heroine by the way. I work in drama and music education
Definitely agree with you that wherever possible Latin should not be offered as an alternative to a MFL, eg German (Latin helped me massively with Russian for example).

And I'll keep you posted on my Minimus progress here

My dd starts Latin next year in Year 8. She's really looking forward to it! She's at school in Canterbury, so lots of Roman stuff around!

This thread has really cheered me up - I did a Classics degree and was getting really depressed about the fact that it was looking like there was no way my kids would have the same opportunity as me, should they want it.
However if I manage to become a sahm in time I will start a Latin club myself, inspired by people on here!

Well I have just had such a nice e-mail from the Minimus Project Administrator Kathy...sooo...go for it!
(PS I WOTH too but have some flexi-time to do Friday's pick-up - when I'll be hopefully offering the club. I made a snap decision just last month that as I am unfortunately unable to consider SAHM for the foreseeable future, I'd be letting my dcs' primary years slide by without doing something concrete to support the school, if I wasn't careful. I am probably mad, but I like to keep busy - and dodge housework )

I did A level Latin. I enjoyed it and it did give me an understanding of tenses etc but ime nothing that I feel that I wouldn't have picked up from a good English or modern language teacher. There are so many other things I would prefer my dcs to learn about and which would have more relevance to today's world.

Can't do it this year, Marina - am back at work fulltime from November

However that may change.... Will be interested to hear how any Minimus teachers get on!

Batters, if your dd is lumbered with Cambridge "no scary grammar" Latin then I'd strongly recommend a trip to the Minimus website that Rosa linked to below. There are some cute games and activities on there that she might like, although they are not really up there on Club Penguin fun levels
Both Crofton and Lullingstone (reasonably accessible by train but a walk from Eynsford Station) are well worth a look. The staff are exceptionally nice at Lullingstone and the building is due a facelift.

DS is at a rather good grammar school. He started Latin in year 7, and this year(9) Greek in his lunchtime! The Greek class is voluntary and the GCSE course starts every three years for any boys in years 7/8/9 (iyswim).

The Classics Dept is very active. This year they are going to Sicily, a couple of years ago DS went to Pompeii with them.

When I started secondary school, there were a lot of boys from private prep schools who had all done Latin for several years, so Latin was streamed from year 7.

Zookeeper, I think tbh Latin may fill gaps in MFL and English lessons where grammar is not properly covered in the syllabus. It certainly did in my case. Russian was taught by a fluent dissident speaker at my school, but she was hopeless at explaining the structure of the verbs and indeed the cases of the nouns. Those of us also doing Latin found the Russian language much easier to grasp.

closer to home there's the museum of london and of course the british museum. also fishbourne roman palace near chichester. has she read the caroline lawrence books?

How brilliant that they offer Greek too clerkKent. It was a step too far in my case, I never did get the hang of the pesky modes

Marina

The only problem is that dw and I cannot help him with homework! dw reckons she will be able to read the words as she knows Russian, and so test him on vocab, but I a not so sure....

Hmm, some similarity with Cyrillic, but a lot of faux amis too - one of the reasons I chucked Greek I have to say.

Batters we found taking dd to Pompeii last year helped a lot