Level 1: Bestiae Ubique/Animals Everywhere

Level 1: Bestiae Ubique/Animals Everywhere

Students learn to understand and say sentences about what animals do in various habitats: pets in the home and backyard, animals on the farm, animals in the forest, animals in the water, and animals in the wild. Students learn content knowledge about animals, such as animal life cycles and habitats, while learning Latin!

Students in this level learn…

• to recite three prayers, four bible verses, six religious songs and hymns (optional components)
• to sing 10-15 traditional children’s songs and nursery rhymes, many of them with several stanzas
• to understand and say around 16 “Gouin series” of approximately 6-8 sentences each (over 100 complete sentences)
• to understand and respond to questions about animal actions and habitats in the Little Socratic Talks (building from yes/no answers to increasingly long sentences)
• to describe dozens of beautiful works of art from Western and non-Western cultures
• to understand, act out and memorize parts of 11 picture books in Latin in interactive read-alouds as well as Reader’s Theater

Students in 3^rd grade and up also learn explicit grammar:

• verb conjugations, with a focus on 1^st and 3^rd person singular and plural verb forms (all four conjugations are used)
• nouns in the nominative singular and plural, and accusative singular and plural (nouns used are from the 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd declensions) – the focus is on fully understanding the function of subject and direct object in a sentence
• adjectives in the nominative and accusative singular
• ablative of location
• throughout, sentence analysis is foregrounded (e.g. finding the subject, verb, direct object, prepositional phrase)

Teacher Resources include all of the following:

• Teacher Guides
  • 90 thirty-minute lessons, fully planned and fully scripted
  • each lesson incorporates a steady review of everything learned, already planned out
  • lessons includes lots of songs from around the world (using sources such as Mater Anserina, as well as Latin song books published in Europe)
  • optional grammar components directly in the guide so you can use the same teacher guide for multiple grades (some of our current pilot schools are using it in every grade from K through 5th!)
• audio files for all the songs, Gouin series, Little Socratic Talks, Picture Talks, and picture books in ecclesiastical and classical Latin
• PowerPoints to accompany the “Little Socratic Talks”
• PDFs of the picture books for each level (around 8-10 books) – note that we are in the process of publishing these “for real” and will at that point, probably sometime in late spring of 2024, no longer offer these books as part of the preliminary electronic access
• additional materials such as reader’s theater versions of Gouin series or picture books
• an optional student book for 3rd grade and up (with grammar and writing)