We've had some great moments in homeschooling this week. In Latin, we found out all the adjective endings are the same 1st and 2nd Declension endings that we have already learned (something in Latin that's not hard). Grace proceeded to match up Latin nouns and adjectives and was loving it. Grace and Lillie really like Latin and we were talking about why yesterday. Latin is hard, it's complicated, but it's totally logical and when you get it, you have the satisfaction of putting together a difficult puzzle (that was my take - Grace's take was that it was like a secret code).


Earlier in the week, Grace had several times when she heard Latin derivatives on TV (fatal, associate) and she got excited, "That's a Latin derivative!". Lillie has been going around chanting, "Scribere est Augere - To Write is to Act!" and one day she stopped and said, "Does scribble come from scribere?" I said it sure seems like it. Grace jumped in and said, "How about scribe?"

On Wednesday, I was reading about Caesar in Greenleaf's Famous Men of Rome. Grace and Lillie were working on an art project while I read. I was reading about crossing the Rubicon and paraphrasing a little. They starting laughing quietly and I wondered what happened... they were laughing about Caesar. They weren't distracted, they were really getting what I was talking about. When I was done, they asked me to get out the maps of the Roman Empire they had colored on Monday and point out where the Gauls and the Celts were on the map.

It was a pretty long chapter, and I thought I would quit while I was ahead. When I said we were done, Lillie said, "Aren't we going to listen to Story of the World and do narrations?" Well, sure we are.

After listening to the chapter about Octavian, Grace wrote a fabulous narration - she almost took up a whole page. This is a girl that I used to drag three sentences out of her. Lillie wanted to do a dictation instead of a picture, and she did a great job as well.

When we were done, we started talking about Octavian and if he was really like Cincinnatus and then compared Cincinnatus to George Washington. Grace is a U.S. Presidents buff and she had a lot of fun with the topic. I had never even heard of Cincinnatus until this month and here's my 10 year old comparing him to Washington.

I'm excited about all of this. I love to see them getting it, to see that spark. I also wonder if I'm turning them into oddballs. I don't want to stop doing this, but how well do you fit in with your peers when you have fun translating Latin and you like making jokes about Shamshi-adad?

Well, that's a different post I suppose. So far, they fit in just fine with their friends and are normal, happy kids. We'll keep on keepin' on.