My name is Jane Maguire. I have more than 30 years experience teaching modern
foreign languages in state secondary schools.
I'm a member of the Primary Latin Project Committee and
I work for the charity Classics for All.
Latin introduces children, at quite a young age, to what language is,
how it is structured, how it is made up and how different
languages relate to each other and where they've come from.
It supports their work in literacy and it enhances their understanding of
they're own language as well as modern foreign languages.
Schools don't need to find a specialist language teacher or a
specialist classics teacher.
The Minimus course has so much support and resource material around it that
any class teacher or any teaching assistant can be very
successfully trained to deliver it.
Children have a very keen awareness when they're doing Latin of
how it's helping them. Coming down on the train this morning
I met a young man who took Latin GCSE last year and I said to him,
"How do you feel about it. Has it made any difference to you?" and he said,
"I'm glad you asked me that. I'm doing French AS and it has
been a fantastic help to me. I'm so glad I did it."
A really good example, I think, of how Latin can help children both
with English and with modern foreign languages, is at the
beginning of chapter two in the Minimus book they learn
about animals and they describe them.
If we take a porcus obesus, a fat pig,
what do children get out of that?
They have their knowledge of nouns and adjectives reinforced,
they learn that Latin nouns have different endings and they might relate
those to the Latin names that they've got. They see that Latin adjectives have
to match using the same adjectives.
In other words, through fun activities and fat pigs amongst other things,
they're learning about the gender of nouns and adjectival agreements.
This is obviously going to be a huge help once they start learning modern
foreign languages.
Beyond that, the porcus takes them very neatly
into understanding how porc comes from a pig and how obes,
which has nothing very obviously to do with the word fat,
comes to mean what it does.
In terms of cross-curricular links for children, the obvious is history.
Children have to learn about the Romans in Britain in Key Stage 2 and the
Minimus course book is based around the life of a family who
actually lived in the north of England during the Roman times.
If primary children have studied Minimus,
then that can be picked up very successfully by using
the Cambridge Latin course, which is the course most commonly used in
secondary schools. They can progress to their local high
school where they could move on to that and then up to GCSE Latin
which is hugely on the increase in state secondary schools now.
We have had tremendous support from our local museum,
which is Norwich Castle.
We take children there regularly for Roman days and the
museum has been very, very open to working with us and incorporating
Latin into its existing Roman days.
Grants can be obtained for Minimus from the Minimus website.
They are very generous grants for schools to set up
teaching Minimus, in terms of buying resources.
Classics for All, the charity which promotes the teaching of classics,
Latin and Greek, in state schools will give grants for Latin and Greek.
There are numerous resources to support. There is the Minimus website,
there's a very comprehensive teachers book and CD,
there are extra reading books, there are activities on the website,
there is a recently published book called 'Minimus in Practice' which
gives lots of extra classroom ideas, there is an iBook and
we have apps on the way.