The Jenney Latin Program—First Year Latin, Second Year Latin, Third Year Latin, Fourth Year Latin [1990 edition]

Prentice-Hall, School Division

Many newer Latin programs have moved away from the classical approach by using fictional stories about children and everyday situations rather than the classical writings, and by de-emphasizing grammar, instead using a more conversational approach. The Jenney series has been updated so that it is more interestingly written than our old, classical high school Latin texts from the 1940s and ‘50s. However, it still uses classical writings and a strong grammatical approach. Colored pictures, cultural background, and famous Latin quotations are intermixed with solid grammatical study. This is a high school course and assumes that students already have a good foundation in English grammar and understand grammatical vocabulary.

The student text is hardcover, and workbooks are available for the first two years. The teacher’s resource book has answers for both text and workbook, teaching suggestions, additional exercise practice, composition work, and tests. The prices for teacher’s resource guides for the first two years are very high, largely because of the inclusion of cassette tapes and “tapescripts.” Although the tapes and transcripts are not essential, the information in the guides is. Teacher guides for years three and four are much more reasonable since they do not have the tapes and tapescripts and they do not include answers for workbooks.

While this is a very pricey option, it is excellent.