Yesterday, I did my first session running a Latin club where I work (I work at this funny little place with a shop selling handmade things downstairs, and rooms upstairs where they hold workshops and clubs for home educated children). You may have read my post a few weeks ago when I did a taster session, but today was my first ‘proper’ lesson, and as suspected we had a lot more people signing up over September (I had eight children booked in but two couldn’t make it yesterday).
Again, we worked through Getting Started with Latin by William Linney which is the book I used when I started learning Latin. One boy was particularly enthusiastic, taking notes and asking for homework (which he promptly did then and there at the table, after everyone had left to go and play), which was very sweet.
Before Latin, though, I helped out with English, maths and art club too. For English, the kids were drawing their own little wonderland based on the children’s book Horatio Happened. They then had to come up with some adjectives to describe the creatures and habitat they’d drawn. For maths, I was helping two little ones do Roman numerals. One, called Merrie, was more interested in the keyboard nearby than Roman numerals (which is perfectly okay; God knows I didn’t do any maths until I was about fourteen, let alone six), but the other child picked it up really quickly and was solving all sorts of tricky long Roman numbers.
Lastly, for art, we had an art teacher come in to help the children do a drawing of a chicken using pastels. I was sitting next to Merrie, who resolved to draw not a chicken, but a chick, and it was going to be “the tiniest chick”, which effectively meant a dot in the corner of her paper. She maintained that there was a fully formed chick in that dot, it was just very small.
I had a lovely day helping out with the various different clubs, but particularly hosting my own Latin lessons. The children are so funny and sweet, and it’s lovely to feel LLL, my mini childhood business, rekindling.