I got this for my 2nd grader, a handful of years ago. It was my first introduction to Latin and I remember being very pleased with the amount of vocabulary and Latin prayers etc. We worked through several lessons, and then I decided to only work on the vocabulary portion because he didn’t have great handwriting at the time to complete the worksheets. So we did the lessons orally. The next year I brought in child # 2 and we did the program again (a repeat for the 1st child, but it was totally ok). This second year we used the DVD lessons and it went very smoothly. My children still recite some Latin prayers they learned from this program and the vocabulary they learned helped them progress through LFC in the first 5 lessons like a breeze.
I highly recommend Prima Latina with the DVD’s to ALL families starting Latin in grades 1-4th. It is a perfect blend of vocabulary and prayers and is an easy introduction into Latin. Memoria Press has a full range of products for Latin, other languages, classical studies and logic.
Written by Brenda, classically eclective mother of 5. She writes frequently about her homeschooling journey at Tie That Binds Us.
IEW, or Institute for Excellence in Writing has a top of the line writing course called 
Ancient History-Based Writing Lessons, L. Verstegen
When I first began looking into homeschool curriculum a few years ago, one of the first things I came across was Five in a Row, a collection of literature-based unit studies by Jane Claire Lambert. These units are geared towards children ages four through eight, but I have known families who have used this curriculum with younger and older students. There are four separate volumes of Five in a Row. Every volume contains between fifteen and twenty units, each one based on a classic work of children’s literature. Mrs. Lambert, a veteran homeschooling Mom, has chosen timeless stories such as Make Way for Ducklings, The Story About Ping, and Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, to name a few, on which to base these unit studies.
The guiding principle behind this curriculum is the reading of the story to your children for five days in a row. After each reading, you cover topics of your choosing from the lesson manual. Subjects such as language arts, history, geography, science, applied math, and art are covered. (Five in a Row is not a reading and math curriculum. You would need to add those.) There are always more than a week’s worth of lessons to choose from for each story. Most of the titles are easily obtained at the library or from Amazon. We enjoy purchasing as many of these wonderful stories as possible for our home library because we come to treasure most of them.
For more information about Five in a Row and to see book lists for each volume, visit 
Child-size Masterpieces are sets of over-sized art postcards that come in an over-sized book printed on thick cardstock. The art prints need to be cut (I do ours with a paper cutter) but you can easily remove them from the pages and use scissors and cut on the dotted line provided. The instructions for use are printed on the cover and I cut those out and put them along with the prints in an accordion type file. I own several sets so each set of prints is kept all together in a slot. On the backs of the cards are the title of the painting, the artist’s name, and a brief description of the art time period.
If you think your children are ready for a bit of a challenge, purchase either one of the sets that say step 4 or step 5 on the covers. These sets come with the painting’s name on separate cards for a matching activity.
All of these texts have 13 or 14 lessons. But don’t be fooled into thinking that with a small number of lessons the books won’t last a whole year. These are not short lessons. They each include 10-20 pages of text (I read these aloud). In addition, all the lessons include at least one notebook assignment and either an experiment or project. Many lessons have both a project and an experiment. I like that the author has clearly separated projects and activities from experiments. In the experiments, the scientific method is emphasized including discussions of variables, controls, hypotheses, data collection, and drawing conclusions. So although the book could easily be read in less than a school year, completing all the included notebook pages, projects and experiments will extend this text to easily encompass a year’s study. However, if you do want to complete more than one of these texts in one school year, the Astronomy and Botany books are a little shorter than the Zoology books.
