Daddy's Big Girl Tackles Latin

Don't you dare call her little.  She will set you straight, stomping her foot if necessary.

This wasn't my idea either, at least not for her, and not at the time. Yesterday was a lazy day at home for the Rietz clan.  We are fairly

Christmas Eve

industrious slobs, though; after a couple of bike rides my middle guy was mastering the GoPro camera given him by relatives, my oldest was managing a virtual soccer team, and my daughter was lying on the couch next to me, weaving with her new rainbow loom.  I was on my laptop debugging code.

Although I don't push it too hard, my kids are no strangers to what I do.  My older kids have both played in Linguachet, and several years ago my middle guy (who was 8) actually helped inspire the vocab and forms tabs by the questions he asked me as he worked.  My oldest, who is quite good at graphic design, created my current business cards.  When my daughter asked me today if she could play Linguachet, it didn't surprise me.

She is seven, though.  She's a very good speller, but - like all second graders - she's still learning.  She really just picked up cursive in the last couple of weeks.  She's curious and quick as a whip, but she changes her mind just as quickly.  I certainly didn't picture her composing full sentences in Latin.  I handed her an iPad with a smile, figuring this little experiment would last five minutes at most.

What happened next floored me.  It's exactly what was supposed to happen.  She started typing, looking up almost every word at first.  She's still a hunt-and-peck typist; it still takes her a couple of seconds to find letters like "P".  She didn't whine. She asked questions. She didn't quit.  She fixed all her mistakes.  She celebrated.  She did the first unit.

I figured surely it was time to lighten up...or at least vary the approach before she burned out!  We went outside and threw a "pila" to each other. As we threw, I called the play-by-play in simple, repetitive Latin.  She got cold. She came back in.  She asked to do more Linguachet.

She redid the first unit.  She started the second.

I pulled out Oerberg's Lingua Latina and a globe.  She translated that first page, her confidence surging.  After that she reached for my copy of Cattus Pettasatus. Obviously that wasn't so easy AT ALL, but not being able to do that didn't seem to discourage her at all either.  She went back to Linguachet.

At dinner, I told her that words are fossils.  She immediately started splitting up words she knew.

I took a walk around the front yard with my oldest.  I was worried she'd get frustrated and quit, but I also think kids need space to learn to manage their frustrations. I fully expected to return and find her watching a cartoon, and I would have been fine with that. 

I returned to find her typing Latin. 

Minecraft and Disney get turned down for what!?

At bedtime we often read a Bible story together.  On a whim, I pulled out the Latin Vulgate, reading in Latin from Luke 3, a story she had heard in church - in English - a couple of nights before.  She looked over my shoulder and picked out Latin words she had seen and used throughout the afternoon: "et", "est", "sunt".  Others, like "angeli" she easily picked out from context.

I attach no ongoing expectations here. Today is a new day.  However, as I was first typing that sentence, my daughter woke up walked into my room.  She didn't say good morning.  She asked to play more Linguachet. ;-)