Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

First, the pluses - Production is first-rate, and the book is easy to read. The support at the website ([...]) is terrific as well, especially for flashcards. Whatever typos that were in the first edition were corrected in the books that I got. The authors have clearly been teaching kids for a long time, and it shows. The text is very, very accessible. Now, the minus - I took my daughters through chapter 10, before we moved on to another book. Why? It is just too vocabulary-intensive, without providing a context for the vocabulary. Yes, my daughters learned the vocabulary, but they couldn't do anything with it, because there are no reading assignments to correspond to what they memorized. In addition, there were no translation exercises. I did not use the separate reader, also published by this author, but they don't recommend it until the first half of the book is completed, anyway. This means that kids have to go almost 12 weeks before they actually start doing simple Latin sentences, and that's too long. More time is spent every chapter doing English derivatives from Latin, than is spent on Latin, itself. And that's o.k. - learning Latin as an aid to learning English vocabulary is a worthy goal - it just isn't the goal that I had. Now, the good news - I really, really, really like the publisher, so I bought the Latin book that they did for older kids ("Latin Alive!). As soon as it came, I put "Latin for Children" on the shelf. The "Latin Alive" book strikes a much better balance. There is actually LESS vocabulary per week than the book designed for younger kids. Simplified grammar is presented up front, at an appropriate pace. And, most importantly, they are reading Latin right off the bat. "Latin Alive" also has flashcard support from "[...]". So I reluctantly would NOT recommend "Latin for Children", but am very pleased with the same publisher's book, "Latin Alive".