The way I see it, you have two options when approaching reading the book. You can wait a couple years before approaching the book at all and then speed through the first few chapters; or you can spend a week or two talking and preparing the students to read one chapter at a time over the course of a few years. The allure of the first method is that students get the opportunity to experience the arc of the narrative a little quicker and are thereby more easily enticed by it. Either way, you are going to hit a point where time will need to be spent prefacing the material with a lot of repeated grammar and vocabulary. 

Let’s just start chapter one and say that you have spent the last week or two preparing students by speaking directly to them in Latin and have done a good job of not allowing them to speak in their native language in the classroom. They are, by now, familiar with a few basic expressions and easily understand simple “est/sunt” sentences with basic map vocabulary. How do we read the Lingua Latina text? If the text is not particularly interesting, and you are fairly certain that your students have a good grasp of the grammar and vocabulary, the key is to go quickly, lest you lose student interest. Chapter one is not very interesting beyond the initially tantalizing prospect of reading a foreign language and understanding it. 

Reading the chapter can and should be done in different ways to battle monotony. Maybe for part I of the chapter, you have the students read silently in their heads. For part II, you have them read out loud with a partner, and part III you read together as a class, stopping to call on students to ask them questions. This might not all be done in a single day, but over the course of a few days, with more exercise and practice in between. You could have the students read part I, a process that should only take them a few minutes, and then you drill them with a few spoken questions about the text, and then have them do a written exercise that demonstrates they understood the core content of the chapter. The Exercitia companion book offers a plethora of writing exercises that can be good, provided that the students already understand what is going on, more or less.

I have personally run into many problems trying to implement the Exercitia because I did not spend sufficient time getting the students to understand the content of the chapter itself. I relied on the exercises to be the instructor, and I was always disappointed in the results. The students should probably only struggle to answer one or two of the questions. That would be an ideal ratio of review to challenge, I think, because it keeps students encouraged and feeling like they are making progress, but it also helps them aware of the fact that there is still more to learn. If students constantly feel like they are not understanding something, they very quickly give up, especially if they don’t think they have adequate support. Those Lingua Latina exercises can be brutally difficult if you don’t know what you are doing, because they come with such little support beyond the text itself.

You will run into the same problem with the pensa at the end of the chapter if you have not adequately prepared the students. Pensum C is always fun, and I like to occasionally challenge students to write as interesting of an answer as they can for each one. It is good to keep answers clean and simple sometimes, but I also like to encourage students to write more than the bare minimum to answer a question. They could incorporate some of the phrases and proverbs that they have learned into their answers or some other thing that they didn’t learn from the text itself, but from their time in class with you. Review the answers to these quickly and highlight student answers that you think deserve recognition e.g.

“Euge! gratulor Iohanni quod responsum perpulchrum scripsit. Quintus, inquit, tristior solito est. meministisne illam locutionem quam pridie vobis monstravi: “tristior solito”? Iohannes, discipulus Chryssipo acutior, est alter Cicero. plaudite! si in posterum quispiam responsum aeque gratum scripserit, eius gregi dabo tria puncta. . .” you get the point.

You should follow the same pattern for the subsequent chapters, with the added difference that some chapters might require a significantly larger preparatory period. Chapter eight is a good example of a chapter that springs forward significantly in difficulty, introducing all of the different relative and demonstrative pronouns. It is a confusing chapter on your first go around and may require a solid month of diligent preparation before students are ready to take it on in reading.

I hope that my exegesis has sufficiently clear and that I haven’t left anything too vague. I found that writing on this topic was much more challenging than I had initially thought, and that my opinions changed as I worked through it. Much of this is, admittedly, theoretical, as I have not ever had an all out success teaching via the natural method and often resorted to more traditional grammar translation methods either due to a lack of energy or creativity. Nevertheless, I think I have offered helpful guidelines that will at least get you thinking more carefully about using this book and spoken Latin in your classroom. These are my own opinions that I have formed over the years as a teacher of Latin. If you have anything to add or questions, feel free to send them below 

      – Rogerius