The Bridge to the Latin Road by, Barbara Beers

 When we found out that we were going to review one of the programs from Schola Publications, I was excited. As a family, we really haven't delved deep into grammar. Yes, we have touched on it all along the way, but nothing formal.

So this was going to be interesting.

We chose the The Bridge to the Latin Road. A one-year introduction to Latin designed for students 3rd-6th grades, preparing the teacher and student for the grammar and translation work in The LATIN Road to English Grammar.

When the box arrived we found that what they supplied for us was complete in every way. There are 6 DVD's where Barbara Beers, creator of the Latin Road, is teaching the teacher, that would be us, how to teach the children. For me this was invaluable.

It also came with 2 binders. A student binder and a teacher's binder. The children are also given 3 pencils, (1 red, 1 blue and 1 regular) along with a 6 inch ruler.

Throughout the program we will be covering various parts of speech, sentence diagramming, and Latin roots, suffixes and prefixes. All of these put together lay a wonderful foundation for any student to prepare for further exploration of Latin, or even just to excel in the understanding of the English language.

As I touched on earlier, it was helpful to have the DVD's to watch. I tried it both ways, having the children watch with me, and also, watching them prior to teaching. For us, it worked better for me to watch the DVD's ahead of time, and then teach the children. The DVD's did not keep their attention.

The only thing that was disconcerting for me, were there were times on the DVD where Ms. Beers would refer to something from the previous year, and it was not included in our notebook. My desire would be that those items would also be included in this program as well. However, we were able to work around that.

All in all, we really like the program. There was one other thing that we used the program for, that was not the way it was intended. While the children were getting lots of handwriting practice with the dictation of sentences. However, I rather like the handwriting that was included in the teacher's manual. So I would also use some of the sheets of words for my children to copy from, to help then with their letter formations.

Please take some time to check out Schola Publications and see how you can incorporate this wonderful product into your family.