Want to empower your child with sharp critical thinking skills, mastery of grammar, and a love for language? The Classical Conversations Essentials program is the key. This program fosters the essential skills and learning habits that will pave the way for success in high-school-level Latin in the Challenge program and far beyond.
Building a Strong Foundation with Classical Education: The Importance of Language Skills
One of the things that first attracted me to the classical model of learning was its emphasis on language skills as a tool to develop thinking skills, because words are the building blocks of ideas. Those who have a mastery of words have a greater ability to master ideas.
Understanding the structure of language is a key component of the language mastery which is the foundation of sound thinking skills. Remember Helen Keller, before she understood language? Because of her frustration with her inability to communicate, she behaved like an animal. Once Anne Sullivan finally got her to understand that everything has a name, it became apparent that she was brilliant. In the end, she could read five languages and one of them was Latin.
Essentials Program: Equipping Students for Latin and Beyond
In order to lay the proper foundation for students to attain this important mastery of language, Classical Conversations has established the Essentials Program. This two-hour afternoon tutorial is designed to prepare fourth through sixth graders for the future study of languages, including Latin. In it, they learn that each word in a sentence has a job to do, and they learn what those jobs are. Students analyze English sentences by asking a series of questions.
Mastering the Building Blocks: Grammar in Essentials
They learn that no matter the level of complexity of a sentence, they can understand the function of every word in it by looking for the same basic elements: subject, verb, direct object and predicate nominative, and modifiers. Once a student has mastered this information, he is prepared to read, understand, and write complex sentences. These skills not only empower students in their English language studies but also serve as a stepping stone for future language learning, such as Latin.
The same skills apply to Latin. No matter what the subject is, the most effective teaching methods begin with what the student knows, and lead him to the new information. Students who know English well have the foundation from which to begin to learn Latin. As they examine Latin sentences, they have already formed the habit of asking basic questions as a means of understanding English sentences. These same questions are the keys to understanding sentences in Latin.
Furthermore, they are not perplexed by the idea that a word, such as a noun, can have a number of functions. They have already seen a noun as a subject, as a direct object, a predicate nominative, the object of a preposition, and so on. Thus, memorizing noun endings becomes more a matter of what to memorize, and less about why it makes sense.
The same is true of other parts of speech. Students who know English grammar are comfortable with the difference between what kind of word it is (noun, verb, adjective, preposition, and so on) and how it functions in the sentence (subject, adverbial phrase, linking verb, and so forth). Students who are not familiar with the parts of speech and the parts of a sentence are at a disadvantage, as they are grappling with two levels of grammar at once—the grammar of English, as well as the grammar of Latin.
Unlocking the Language: Decoding Skills for Success in Latin
The Classical Conversations Essentials program, geared toward fourth through sixth graders, is a program that focuses on the structures and patterns of language.
The primary goal of the Essentials program is to give students a firm grasp on the grammar of language and a core set of dialectic skills for analyzing and understanding language.
The Challenge program is generally geared toward high school-aged students and uses the Henle Latin texts. The primary goal of the first year of the Challenge program is to build upon the English grammar learned in Essentials and the Latin forms, basic syntax, and vocabulary they master in Challenge A while reading and translating simple sentences.
The Essentials program is therefore a solid stepping stone to Challenge-level Latin—it provides the basic learning skills, basic grammar skills, and basic dialectic skills that will be applied not only in Latin, but in all areas of study.
Both Essentials and Challenge Latin help students acquire and perfect certain basic learning and study skills. Each program teaches a systematic method of learning that moves from the known to the unknown. By using simple sentence structures that grow in complexity, students build knowledge gradually, but firmly. Working systematically, students learn to study intelligently and effectively while they develop habits of concentration and orderly thinking.
For example, in Essentials, English grammar is taught using lists, definitions, and charts. This technique is duplicated in Latin studies, where students memorize vocabulary as well as paradigm charts to show the relationships of words and ideas. Students begin to understand why vocabulary and forms matter as they develop and strengthen their minds.
These basic skills will carry students through a lifetime of learning.
Along with basic learning skills, basic grammar skills are honed in both Essentials and Challenge Latin. The Essentials program works to prepare students by building, strengthening, and mastering the grammar of the English language. Each week, Essentials lessons focus on one of the eight parts of speech and one of the basic sentence structures. Overlearning these parts of speech and sentence structures lays a solid foundation that will be utilized in the study of Latin.
In Essentials as well as in Challenge-level Latin, nouns and verbs are defined and categorized by type, attribute, usage, and tense. Knowing these core classifications in English allows students to easily translate the ideas to Latin. Challenge Latin further develops students’ foundation in English grammar by applying Latin language rules to the memorized English forms.
Students who have overlearned this basic grammar are well prepared to dive into Latin studies.
Essentials: A Bridge from Grammar to Dialectic
While mastering learning skills and grammar skills are critical, bridging the gap between grammar and dialectic is the key to the Essentials and the Challenge Latin programs.
Beginning in Essentials and carrying on to Latin, students are guided from grammar to dialectic as they move task to task in order to analyze words and sentences. Using a dialectic exchange or a discussion-based format, teachers/tutors and students work through tasks together, discussing the thinking process as they go. This dialectic discussion allows students to analyze, or parse, sentences while confirming their understanding of the information. As Essentials students examine sentences in detail, they tell everything they know about each word in the sentence.
The same approach is employed in the Challenge program. Students parse sentences in English as well as Latin. Using a similar system of investigation, students categorize parts of speech and examine sentence details, working toward a mastery of both English and Latin. Students are able to take patterns learned in Essentials and apply them effectively to new concepts introduced in Latin.
These basic dialectic skills train the brain to think and process in an orderly manner, which students will naturally apply to other areas of study.
Essentials: A Stepping Stone to Knowing God and Making Him Known
As a result of this systematic approach to the study of English, Essentials students learn to think of language, not as a nebulous cloud which somehow conveys meaning, but as a structured entity with specific identifiable parts which can be decoded when the meaning is not readily apparent. Each word in the sentence has a role. It is there to do a job.
This disciplined approach to the decoding of language which is learned in Essentials is an important basis of preparation to study Latin. However, all this decoding of language is useless unless it increases our awareness of the fact that we are created “imago Dei,” in the image of God. As students understand the rudiments of language, they are also better prepared to “know God and to make Him known.”
