Award-Winning Latin Tutors serving Portsmouth

The student translated passages from his workbook. Some were passages that he was familiar with that we reviewed, some were new. I used these to gauge his comfort with the language and to identify both his strengths and where we could use some practice. He was very receptive and seemed to have a good grasp on the subject. He was open to asking questions and did not hesitate to identify where he was having difficulty. I emphasized working on grammar and showing him what each word did in a sentence. I also tried to spend some time on the current chapter of his text in order to prepare for the concepts that will soon be introduced in class (the genitive case). I plan on gathering some general resources to send to the student for review that will be helpful once school starts.

The student and I were able to have a productive session preparing for his upcoming Latin exam. We started by reviewing the concepts that his exams would cover. I decided to spend the first 45 minutes or so of our session going over concepts in fairly extensive detail. I also left him with some worksheets and practice problems to help him review. Next, we worked on some translation practice, using both seen and unseen passages. We finished up our session by talking about test-taking techniques and ways to ensure that he does not make avoidable mistakes. I think that if he does a bit more preparation on his own and uses the strategies we discussed on test day, he will perform very well on his exam.

The student and I had a terrific session this afternoon. We covered conditional sentences, then we spent a half hour reviewing a Latin project that reviewed the use of the subjunctive mood in Latin. Great job!

This week, we first reviewed the handouts that the student completed. She did pretty well overall, but was confusing a couple of her endings (primarily the "we" endings and the "they" endings). We went over the endings several times, but I think she could still use more practice with the future and future perfect, so I'll send another handout for her to complete over the next week. We ended the session by reviewing the relevant story for the quiz she missed.

Today, the student and I worked on a translation he had been given in his class about the Trojan horse. He said that this would be a better example of the kind of translation he has to do in his class and that it would give me an idea of why he finds his class as difficult as he does. I will say, the translation was definitely a step up from what we have been doing, but he performed admirably. I believe that vocabulary is still his greatest concern, with usage next. I plan to continue to work on these sorts of handouts with him, both from his class and from my own sourcing.

We reviewed the student's handout on Jason and the Argonauts in preparation for her quiz tomorrow. We translated each sentence and talked about specific grammatical constructions in each one. We focused on uses of ad + gerundive to show purpose, cum clauses, and ut clauses.