I've been teaching Latin to two small classes in our weekly homeschool co-op for the past year using Latin is Fun as the primary text. The younger students were 9-11 yrs. old and the older students were ages 12-14. The text is a large workbook with a lot of cartoon-like illustrations and dialogue boxes to make the text engaging and intended to help students connect a Latin word directly with an idea rather than to the English word. Since this is a "classical" program and we wanted the children to learn "ecclestiastical" or "Church" Latin, we simply replaced the pronunciation guide in the front of the book and supplemented the program with Latin hymns and prayers.

We really enjoyed the Latin class and the students have become very enthusiastic about it, and I'm sure this is partly due to the format of the book. It really helped them connect Latin with real life today, made it fun and engaging, and gave them a really good start in Latin. They were forced to use what they learned in grammar very precisely and keep lots of rules, endings and vocabulary in their heads in order to successfully complete the assignment.

Having said this, there were a number of drawbacks to the book that might especially be frustrating to a homeschool family with no prior Latin experience. First, each chapter introduced a very large amount of vocabulary, some of which were hard to find when they came up in later usage. It would have been nice to include straight-forward vocabulary lists at the beginning of each chapter which could be studied and memorized, but the problems went farther than this as some of the vocabulary that would pop up mid-chapter couldn't even be found in the glossary in the back. We did make up our own vocabulary lists and study cards which helped to sort this out, but still had a lot of frustrations in completing particular assignments. Second, in order to keep the student from being overwhelmed with all the declensions of nouns, the author only introduces a few cases to begin with and then later goes back and sorts out how it all fits together. My students, however, sensed the disorder and really wanted to see how all the cases line up together in order to have the bigger picture in their heads. So we used this book alongside the Henle Latin Grammar which was a great aid in sorting things out. Third, although there seems to be plenty of written work in each chapter, there isn't really a lot of simple translation work at each stage which would have helped reinforce each idea as it was being studied. To resolve this, I had the students write up sentences for each other to translate (which was challenging and also fun - particularly since "silly" sentences were smiled upon). I also supplemented with some pretty tough crossword and word search puzzles (which are very easy to create at http://www.puzzlemaker.com) .

The long and short of it is that we had a great year with Latin and the students benefitted greatly from the extra effort we put into making the book work better for us. I covered about one third of the book with my older students, but the younger students got a bit bogged down with the grammar. We only went through a few chapters of the text, but spent lots of time making vocabulary cards and memorizing endings in order to prepare them for more Latin in the future. One of the moms in our co-op also gave the younger students several weeks of diagramming, which they learned to love and which is an excellent aid to understanding Latin. I'm sure they're on the right track for studying more Latin in the future.

The book is probably best for students or parents who have either had some Latin background or have a good grasp of English grammar.