The Genial Hearth
I’ve just put the kettle on, join me for a cuppa and a chat.
Archive for Classical
July 24, 2007 at 12:05 am · Filed under Classical, For the Future, Home Education, Language
(In spite of what I said last week!)
This morning at KinderClassics, we were talking about resources, and because I seemed to have come across a number of the Latin courses, the teacher asked if I knew of any Ancient Greek resources for little ones. I told him there were and promised to email him the information.
I found it ended up rather longer than I expected! Then I figured that I’d post it here for my own (possible) future reference.
I’m just at the stage of noting these… and I haven’t seen any of them up close.
I’ve tried to link directly to the source… but most of these are also available through Amazon.
There are a number of different forms of Ancient Greek. The main ‘camps’ are Koine (biblical) and Attic (used by playwrights and philosophers). Koine is generally seen as significantly easier than Attic, although apparently it’s much easier learning Attic once you know Koine. For little ones, the only options are Koine. From reading the Latin Centered list, it sounds as though there might be some sales to be made if anyone came up with a children’s Attic course:-)
Elementary Greek (from Open Texture) is a three year course, aimed at eight or nine year olds. It comes with textbook, audio assist, work book and flash cards. It’s a fairly new course (I hadn’t realised they’d actually finished the sequence), but generally, the Latin Centered (LCE) folk who have tried it seem to like it. I believe it’s a parts-to-whole approach.
From Trivium Pursuit comes A Greek Alphabetarion and A Greek Hupogrammon (they also have an alphabet banner). I believe that these are just an intro to the alphabet, and a copybook for writing practice. They do have Homeschool Greek Volume One and Homeschool Greek Volume Two (which are aimed at the late primary/early secondary age group) and Little Bitty Baby Learns Greek (which is also an introduction to the alphabet). I haven’t heard anything about these, aside from the alphabetarion, which generally seems to be fine, but obviously is limited:-)
I’d forgotten Hey Andrew, Teach Me Some Greek which has been around for a while. Some seem to really love this and others not so much. It’s apparently quite slow, and the books are more expensive than some of the other options. Unless starting with very young children, there seems to be a recommendation to begin with level 2. (There’s an overview here). It is apparently a whole-to-parts approach like Minimus.
And I’ve just seen -coming this year- Greek for Children. I know nothing about it, but I know a lot of people like their Latin for Children.
At this point, you have a choice, depending on why you’re doing Greek.
If you want to continue with Koine (to read the New Testament) you go to Machen’s New Testament Greek for Beginners or Mounce’s Basics of Biblical Greek.
Or, if you wish to change to Attic, there is Athenaze, Introduction to Attic Greek by Mastronarde, Crosby and Schaeffer’s Introduction to Greek (no-frills, and no answer key), John Williams White’s First Greek Book (free download from I believe this is also pretty basic) or Cambridge’s Reading Greek.
Homer of course, wrote in Homeric which is different again (although similar to Attic, I believe). So there’s also a Reading Course in Homeric Greek.
Some Aesop’s fables in Greek, as well as Latin and English.
And after you’ve done all this, you might just be able to read Harry Potter!
I guess I should do the same thing for Latin—maybe another day:-)
July 15, 2007 at 12:42 am · Filed under Classical, For the Future, Home Education, LCC, Latin, Organisation, Philosophies
(Because Purrdence asked why Latin rather than another LOTE! This was my reply—with some expansion!)
*grin*
A whole other post (and here’s a little one:-) )!
There are many reasons. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, which is I guess what started me thinking about it.
I see Latin as a great beginner for other Romance languages, from a vocab perspective. It’s a great beginning place for grammer, because it’s a declined language—and the pronunciation is much easier than Russian! (Ancient) Greek could also be another option, but the resources for Attic (as in Homer etc) are apparently very sparse, and not good for self-teaching, Koine would be workable, but I don’t think we’re going to be reading the New Testament in the original, which seems to be the source material that is used. We could do German, but it’s not something I’ve ever been particularly interested in.
Latin for me is as much about the mental discipline as the fact it’s a LOTE (and that depends on your moderator… some of them won’t accept it I believe). We’ll be introducing French shortly (should have done so before now, but I fell down on getting myself in the swing early:-( ), but my plan is to continue Latin as far as possible.
(Very Euro-centric I know, but that’s my language background. Paddington and I have both done Indonesian, but not as much as I have French, and he’s also done some Japanese. I doubt we’ll stay solely with European languages, but it certainly was where I planned to start… and once you’ve learned one LOTE, I’ve found others much easier to approach. In the house there are French, Indonesian, Japanese, Russian and Swedish learning materials, and a Zulu dictionary. There’s also lots of books about computer languages:-) )
Poppins has a great quote, (which appears to have disappeared off her site)
“I choose it because a mind that has been asked to follow a rigourous learning plan is never out-of-date. My goal as an educator is to equip my students with the tools they need in order to learn whatever it is they want to do in life, whether it’s how to work a washing machine or draft architectural drawings. I believe that with a classical education my children will have the mental equivalent of a gymnast’s body-strong, flexible, well-honed, practiced.”
At this stage my plan is to follow the Latin-Centered Curriculum, which works from a less is more background (unlike a _lot_ of others, which involve jamming in as much as possible!), and I’m hoping that Latin will help us in that simplification (I know I’m prone to trying to do too much!)
The other thing is that this opportunity landed on our doorstep:-) We’re going with the flow:-) I am however, not certain that we’re quite ready for this. As I said, it may be too formal. We were (are) planning to begin French this year. But our plan with that was getting together with another family of children and hiring a native (or near native) speaker to come and play with them. We’d have a craft and obviously toys, and maybe they’d do a nursery rhyme or two, but not so much of the sit and listen to teacher (he is aware of their ages, they don’t sit long.. but they do sit around a table and listen to ‘lectures’). (If anyone knows someone like that… who is free some weekday mornings so we can try and find one to suit, and wouldn’t be put off by travelling to Wanneroo… we’re looking to employ someone!) I’m still hopeful that we can find a play leader for the French idea, and at that point we’ll think about finishing the Latin (for now… I was planning on leaving it till he was five:-) There are a couple of courses that apparently work well with kids that age, and can be taught at home—I’m not relying on this for socialisation!)
I do plan to blog more about my longer term plans/goals—but I’m wary of putting too much of it down too soon… I have outlines and sketches, but I’m pretty much going with the flow for this year and the next, planning, but then seeing what eventuates. You’ve probably noticed that there’s quite a discrepency between our plans and our reality:-) I’m hoping that they get a little closer together towards the end of next year… I’m conscious though, that no plan survives contact with the enemy. So although I do have plans, I don’t want to get them too fixed, because they may well not suit our children.
February 4, 2007 at 11:25 pm · Filed under Classical
As Drew is doing, I’m thinking that chess will be part of our learning programme. This has some points worth noting.
January 25, 2007 at 10:33 pm · Filed under Classical, For the Future, Home Education, Nature Study, Science, Science
How is it I have never come across this before?
I’ve just downloaded it. It is mac friendly. It gave me a world map to select my location (I was expecting it to be US-centric). It even has a night-time mode, so you can take it outside and not disturb your night vision!
This will go wonderfully with the hammock!
June 9, 2005 at 12:56 pm · Filed under Classical, For the Future, Home Education, Latin
Sarah says it so well.
I choose it because a mind that has been asked to follow a rigourous
learning plan is never out-of-date. My goal as an educator is to equip
my students with the tools they need in order to learn whatever it is
they want to do in life, whether it’s how to work a washing machine or
draft architectural drawings. I believe that with a classical education
my children will have the mental equivalent of a gymnast’s body -
strong, flexible, well-honed, practiced.
June 18, 2004 at 4:08 pm · Filed under Books, Charlotte Mason, Classical, Family, For Adults, For Children, Home Education, Philosophies, Puggle
Well, as the title says, much has happened.
Mere days after my first post, our son was born. Since then, I’ve barely had time to think about anything other than feeding and sleeping… I have managed to fit in a little reading, now that feeding requires attention basically at the beginning and end only (makes a huge difference! See a lactation specialist if you even think there’s a problem!)
So I’ve been catching up on all sorts of things. The book for bookclub (’Bridge of Birds’ by Barry Hughart), some books I’d been thinking of for next month’s bookclub (’The Blue Sword’ by Robin McKinley… sadly one of the female character’s name is pronounced the same as our son, ‘Sister Light, Sister Dark’ by Jane Yolen—and then the other two in that series ‘White Jenna’ and ‘The One-Armed Queen’). I finally decided on ‘Mary Poppins’ by P. L. Travers, so I’ve now read that as well. Pad and I saw a documentary on Travers on the ABC just before Puggle was born, and it made me realise that I hadn’t read it. Given it’s position in our culture, that seemed an oversight, and it also seemed likely that many other EFOP folk were similarly lacking:-) This week I’ve also been rereading some of the Swallows and Amazons books by Arthur Ransome… I don’t think I actually read them as a child (although, possibly I did, George certainly had them on her shelf), but I first read them some years ago. They are books I love to go back to… when I was at our local library I noticed that they had a number of them on the new books shelf—it seems they’ve been reprinted, so it was obviously time to read through them again:-)
The other type of reading I’ve been doing has been homeschooling stuff. I’ve re-read and marked up the first chapters of ‘Anne of Green Gables’ (L. M. Montgomery) for the copywork project attached to Ambleside Online. I (obviously) not currently using AO, but I like the concept. I will probably combine it (somehow) with ‘The Well-Trained Mind’ (Jessie Wise/Susan Wise Bauer)—my other recent reading. I signed up to select copywork from ‘Anne’, just before I got pregnant, as a way of contributing to the homeschooling community. I have spent much of the last couple of years lurking on a number of lists, gathering information, and I thought it was time I put something back. Going through ‘Anne’ like this has encouraged me to read it more closely than I have for a long time.
Well, that’s enough for today. Hopefully I will get around to filling in some of the blanks between these first two posts. I certainly want to add Puggle’s birth story. But, for now, I must go and talk to a crochety child.
by A. A. Milne
by Andrew Lang
