Award-Winning Private Latin Tutoring in Kirkland, WA

"In this session the student and I spent the bulk of the time preparing for a quiz on Indirect Questions (chapter 42) that he will take next week. We looked at how these are similar to the syntax we looked at last week for cum-clauses; we discussed the theory behind them and got in a lot of good practice. We also spent time generally reviewing verb tenses. He is good at recognizing/knowing the forms, but his grasp of the concepts was a little shaky. After some time discussing this, he expressed a greater confidence with this. The plan is to continue this type of general review each week as we come across other concepts he wants/needs to improve upon."

"Today, we continued to practice the material from Stage 15 in preparation for the student's test. She is still struggling with identifying noun case, but we were able to review the basics, while continuing to focus primarily on noun and adjective agreement and relative pronouns. We went over portions of her study guide, and we translated the passage that will be on her exam. She seems quite confident with the passage especially. "

"Today, we spent most of the session working on the forms of the verb in the passive voice, which the student has a quiz on in class this Friday. I started out by reviewing how the forms of the verb are generated for the active voice, breaking down the verb into stem + tense marker + personal endings, and then taking him through the steps on conjugating the different tense combinations. He struggled a bit at first, but gained more confidence with repetition, as we repeated the same process with slight modifications to create the future vs the imperfect, etc. Then, we moved on to doing all the same things with the passive voice, where the primary change is simply using the passive personal endings instead of the active. Then, we reviewed the forms of the perfect passive system, which they were to cover in class the next day, again breaking it down as a system rather than dozens of individual forms to be memorized. Finally, we did some review of comparative and superlative adjectives, which they reviewed early in the week, as well as a quick review of declining some of the participles."

"We spent the entire session preparing for tomorrow's test, covering vocabulary, short verb translations, sentence parsing, and sentence translations. The latest material focuses on the many participles and infinitives, and the student and I looked at these closely and with various approaches. He hesitates slightly at times with these many forms, but his eventual understanding is very good. "