Fourth Form Latin Saves The Day!

Review of Fourth Form Latin + Henle I from Memoria Press

I was very excited to be given the opportunity to review Fourth Form Latin + Henle I, the final year of a four year Latin series from Memoria Press, and for my son it saved the day!

Will It Enhance Your Homeschool

Learning Latin is one of those check boxes you have to tick off if you are homeschooling using the Classical Education style. I learned Latin as a child, as did my husband, and it was invaluable for understanding word roots, scientific vocabulary, and grammar.

Fourth Form Latin + Henle I is a complete curriculum that, combined with the previous three years of Memoria Press Latin, will take your child through the equivalent of Henle 1.

Everything that Memoria Press publishes is of the highest quality. I have used their curriculum with my kids over the years because every course is clearly laid out so parents can easily teach at home, even if they are actually learning alongside their child. Fourth Form Latin is even better that other Memoria press products we have worked with, which puts it up there among the best we have encountered ever.

It is easy to use Fourth Form Latin to teach one or many children. You can also adapt the lessons to meet the learning style of your child without trouble.

We needed help getting my son through Henle 1. He was frustrated and had stalled out in the material. But Fourth Form Latin from Memoria Press saved the day!

What You Get With the Fourth Form Latin + Henle

Fourth Form Latin + Henle I Complete Set

Student Text
Student Workbook (you need one of these for each student)
Teacher Manual (this has all the information you need to teach in one spot, including inset pages from the student text)
Teacher Key (Workbook, Quizzes, Tests)
Quizzes and Tests Booklet (this has handy perforated tear-out pages & you need one of these for each student)
Flashcards
DVDs (6 discs, nearly 13 hours total, lessons vary from an hour or two at the start to 20 minutes or so for most of them)
Pronunciation CD
Henle 1 Latin
Henle 1 Answer Key (this we did not receive as part of the review, but it is part of your purchase)
Henle Grammar (this we did not receive as part of the review, but it is part of your purchase)

Typical Week Teaching Fourth Form Latin

Day 1: Greeting & Recitation, Latin Saying, Vocabulary, Grammar – Chalk Talk, Workbook

Day 2-4: Greeting & Recitation; review of Latin Saying, Vocabulary, and Grammar – Chalk Talk; Workbook

Day 5: Greeting & Recitation, Oral Drill, Weekly Quiz or Test, Cumulative Review

Time Required to Teach Lessons

If you use all the materials that come with this curriculum as suggested in a homeschooling setting, you will find you spend about an hour a day prepping and teaching. I found that teaching foreign languages to my kids takes about the same amount of effort and time as teaching math. It is one of those subjects that needs teacher prep, consistent lessons, and daily homework.

Time Spent By Yourself Preparing: 20-30 minutes (I used this time to remind myself how to pronounce the words and phrases, check that I knew the grammar, and make sure that I could teach the material for the day)
Lesson Video: You can use this as a reference for yourself, or in place of teaching you would do with your child (6 DVDs)
Pronunciation CD (only need this once a week, at the start of a new lesson): 0-5 minutes (although I found that if you already know Latin, you can skip this activity. Also, the pronunciation on the CD and in the video is quite different from the European Latin pronunciation I learned as a child.)
Reading Lesson/Recitation Time: 20-25 minutes (includes plenty of time to discuss)
Time for Student to complete workbook: 20-30 minutes
Time to Grade Lesson: 5-10 minutes

Overall time you spend daily: 45-65 min/day

How Many Days A Week Are Required?

The lessons can be taught as little as three days a week, but I have found that my children tend to forget foreign languages unless we do them daily (on the weekdays).

Prerequisites For This Curriculum

This is a rigorous Latin program designed to take your child through to the end of Henle 1 in a manner that is more intuitive and easier for a lot of students. The instructions are clear and we found that it was easy to adapt what my son already had learned through his Henle 1 studies. Minimally your child either needs to have completed First Form Latin, Second Form Latin, and Third Form Latin, or worked through at least about a third of the Henle 1 text, combined with Henle Grammar (as my son did.)

Teaching More Than One Child Is Easy

The great part about any language curriculum from Memoria Press is that it works so well when used in so many different ways. There is even guidance for teaching the lessons to a group, in the scenario of a Co-Op class or in a school setting. If you are teaching more than one child, there are also games you can play together that reinforce the lessons.

How We Ended Up Using The Lessons

My son learns best by hearing and speaking, and not by writing. So we adapted the lessons to make them all oral, with the exception of tests and quizzes.

I adapted the material to suit his learning style, which means I sit with him each day and together we talk through each part of the day’s lesson. I watch the lesson video and listen to the pronunciation CD myself as a way to prepare for the lesson, without my son.

We read the lesson together (I with the Teacher Manual, and my son with the Lesson Book). The teacher book is really handy since it has a reduced-size image of the same page my son read in his lesson book, along with guidance and instructions for me to use as we work through the day’s material.

Then we work through the workbook. My son uses the Student Workbook and I use the Teacher’s copy of the workbook (with answers included).

We spend perhaps an hour and a half together each day working on Latin, but then I also spend about a half hour at the start of each new Lesson at the start of each week getting myself prepared.

How We Liked It

My son really enjoys the enhancement of Fourth Form Latin instead on just working through Henle alone. There is so much extra historical geographical information.

Also the main complaint we had with Henle on its own was that my son was confused about verbs. If you follow Henle, without the Memoria Press Fourth Form Latin, then you first learn nouns (pretty much all the declensions) before you get to an understanding of verbs. Instead Henle introduces second person singular and plural forms of select verbs along the way so that you have enough parts of speech under your belt to start speaking and translating.

As we worked through Henle, prior to this review, my son would get frustrated every lesson because he did not like just memorizing a couple of verbs. He wanted to understand how they are used in Latin, the broader picture.

This is something that the First through Fourth Form Latin from Memoria Press handles right up front. That is probably the main reason that my son really loves this curriculum.

Since we started with Fourth Form Latin and jumped from Henle 1, we needed to spend some time catching up on the grammar that most Memoria students would have in the earlier years of Latin. We used Henle Grammar to get my son caught up.

The other big difference that we needed to accommodate when my son switched over to Fourth form Latin was that it assumes your child has had 3 years of building Latin vocabulary. This was not difficult since my son has close to photographic memory. We took the lists of First, Second, and Third Form Latin vocabulary that is in the back of the Student Workbook and digitized them into an electronic flashcard program. That way my son can test his knowledge using his tablet.