After finding out how much fun learning Latin with True North Homeschool Academy in a live online interactive class was, my daughter was eager to try another! So we decided to sign her up for True North's Writing Club, an online meet-up focused on creative writing.

Unlike the weekly Latin class, the Writing Club meets only every other week, for 90 minutes, and it is much more student-driven. The teacher, Lisa Nehring, is there every week to introduce writing topics and to guide the discussion and activities, but it is not a class. It's a club, and the goal of it is to help the club members meet their own goals in writing, whether that is writing poetry, a novel, a blog, or even for a contest.

The Writing Club is conducted via Zoom online conferencing. Students receive a link to join the meeting and once there can see and interact with one another under the direction of the teacher, who can also share his or her screen with them. Zoom also allows the teacher to put the students together for breakout sessions, during which they can see and interact with each other in a semi-private online "room" that is visible to the teacher but not to other students. This allows them to work together on a part of a writing project and then come back to the rest of the class to share their results.

My daughter has long dreamed of being a writer, so this club seemed a natural match. I had been told it was geared toward older students, with some younger ones in as well. What we found was that it was definitely more appropriate for high school students. Many of the students in the club were already prolific writers and were there to hone their art and to share what they wrote with others. My daughter is still at the point of writing simple stories and making them more interesting by adding details, so she was a little out of her league.

At the same time, these older students were amazing role models. They were patient and kind with her questions and suggestions, and they set the bar higher for her to reach. The writing prompts were open-ended enough for anyone to use, and she looked forward to the challenge every week.

I am excited that True North Homeschool Academy is offering a junior high Writing Club next fall, in addition to the high school Writing Club, as I think that will be a better setup for my daughter, but her experience this year was still a wonderful introduction not only to the skill of writing, but also to the craft. Seeing other students more committed to it than she is was a great way to challenge her and to whet her appetite for more in the future. If you have a child in middle school or senior high who loves writing, this structured teacher-led but student-driven writing club may be perfect for him or her, too!

You can learn more about True North Homeschool Academy on their website, Facebook page, Pinterest account, and Instagram.

We have been homeschooling for nearly six years, and I love it. I love being with my kids, seeing their "aha" moments, and challenging them to learn new things. And I have felt pretty confident in my role as both mom and teacher because, really - it's elementary school. Surely I can teach them basic math, reading and other topics, right?

But there is one topic that left me quaking, just a bit.

Latin.

I never learned Latin. I took French. Even back then, Latin was too foreign, too dead, too useless...or so I thought, compared to French, the language of my ancestors.

Thirty-some years later, I can't speak or read French, and my children are learning Latin. (If you are wondering why Latin? check out this article.) At least, they are memorizing songs that introduce them to Latin conjugations (verbs) and declensions (nouns). But with my daughter approaching middle school, I've wanted to step up the Latin instruction.

This is where True North Homeschool Academy comes in. My friend Lisa Nehring runs this online school for homeschoolers and invited me to enroll my daughter in her Beginning Latin live online interactive class. Let me tell you what we found.

Beginning Latin is a year-long class that we jumped into mid-year, which made it challenging but not impossible. This is for two reasons. First, the textbook for the course is First Form Latin from Memoria Press. It covers verbs and their conjugations in the first half of the book, and nouns and their declensions in the second half, which is when we joined. Second, since Latin in general is not a spoken language, they were not learning conversational Latin and already chattering away in it. Rather, they were learning the grammar of how to conjugate verbs and decline nouns, and that grammar was at least familiar to my daughter, who had been diagramming sentences in English for the previous year and a half.

Our weekly class is taught by Lisa Nehring, and it uses the Zoom online conferencing format. Students are given a Zoom link, through which they log in to the class. Once there, they can see the teacher and each other. They are also able to speak to each other via microphone (which can be muted by themselves or the teacher when necessary).

​Every week, Magistra Nehring opens the class in prayer, leads them in a chant of the various grammatical forms they have learned, and then dives into the lesson. Through verbal explanations and charts or diagrams shared on her screen, she helps them understand common Latin phrases, English derivatives, how the grammar works, and how to translate from Latin into English and back again. Like an in-person class, the students get to know each other, ask and answer questions, and even get to write on the board!

As I shared last week, this was our first online class, and I did not know what to expect from it. I was delightfully surprised to find that the class was engaging for my daughter. She took to it immediately and, while I am always nearby in case she has questions, she is delighted to participate in some learning without my help. I also found Lisa's explanations and instruction to be clear and helpful, both for my daughter and for me - and I needed to understand, too, to help with her homework! I was also impressed that children as young as eight or nine years old were studying Latin and getting it. I had previously thought it to be too challenging for elementary children, but clearly that is not the case!

The class is earmarked for as young as fourth grade, if the child has already been exposed to some Latin. The fact that my fifth-grade daughter had already memorized some Latin through our classical homeschool program made it less intimidating for her, especially jumping into it mid-year, but even without that, I think she would have been find starting back in September.

Students need the student book, workbook, and flashcards to participate. We also purchased the teacher guide, answer key, tests and quizzes, CD and DVD - partly because we missed the first half of the year, and so we could compare an e-course to what the company sell. We have not yet used the tests and quizzes book, but found the answer key to be so valuable in checking her work during the week. In comparing the instructional DVD to the live class, clearly the live class is much more engaging and involved. I am glad, however, to have the DVDs so we can watch them if my daughter is stuck on a certain point, or if I am. The teacher guide is helpful, too, in case we need to miss a class, although the teacher records the classes and can send them to us via e-mail if needed.

One thing I have realized, as I shared last week, is that an e-course is good for accountability and keeping you and your child on track - but that can be an issue, too. Just as with a regular in-person class, if you miss a class or fall behind in the homework, it can be hard to catch up. However, that is also a life lesson both for me as a homeschool mom and for my daughter as she approaches middle school, and one that is important to learn.

In conclusion, if you are looking for a supportive Latin class for your children, I strongly recommend Beginning Latin with True North Homeschool Academy. It provides a solid foundation upon which to continue their future Latin studies, as well as a launching pad from which they can explore other, related, languages in the future.

You can learn more about the True North Homeschool Academy on their website, Facebook page, Pinterest account, and Instagram.

We have been homeschooling for nearly six years, and all that time we have always "done school" in a real-life community or at home. This semester, for the first time, we have been able to give online learning a try - and my kids loved it! I will share more about the specific classes we used over the next few days, but I want to share here what we have discovered about online learning in general and what to keep in mind when you seek out classes for your kids!

We have been trying three classes this semester. My fifth grade daughter is taking a weekly beginning Latin class from True North Homeschool Academy, as well as participating in their every-other-week Writing Club. My first grade son took part in a four-week Geography Class from Huddleston Academy Live Academics. All three classes were live (in real time, not just a video presentation), and all used Zoom to facilitate the classes, which included anywhere from three to twelve other students.

I was not sure what to expect from a live e-course, as my only experience with online learning has been at the college level when you might listen to a course lecture online and submit assignments via email or a website. What my children experienced was a whole different experience. The way the Zoom platform works, students can see each other and talk with each other during the class, either via their computer microphone or by "chatting" on the keyboard. The instructor can switch between being on camera or sharing the computer screen, such as a presentation slide. The instructor also has the ability to mute students when needed and to allow them to write on the screen when they need to share an answer or participate in some other way, all of which mimics a "real life" classroom in some really neat ways.

My children both have thoroughly enjoyed live e-courses. The part they have liked the best is the instant community. Being in a class with peers, even though they have not connected offline with them, has given their school time a different flair from just studying with Mom and each other. They have also enjoyed having academic attention from another adult. I've been delighted to see both of them strive to shine and earn praise from their online teachers, and to hear another adult comment on their strengths and weaknesses.

Before this semester, I truly had not thought much about online learning. I taught professionally for many years before staying home with my children, and my husband teaches as well, so I assumed that we could pretty much handle homeschooling on our own. But while I still feel confident in that, I now see some key ways that a live e-course can be particularly helpful.

I can see this being particularly helpful in foreign languages (though my husband studied Latin, it is new to me) or in subject areas that a parent feels less confident in. At the same time, the e-classes enabled me to learn alongside my child (off-camera, of course, lest she die of embarrassment!) so I could then help her complete her assignments.

It is hard to replicate classroom discussion in a homeschool environment, and there are many subjects where the discussion and wrestling with issues is just as valuable as the information received from the book or the instructor.

My kids actually get plenty of interaction - "unsocialized" they are not! At the same time, they love interacting with peers and others, and this allows them to do so in an academic setting with a moderator/teacher who keeps everything on track.

E-classes did not mean that I was not needed! While my son obviously needed more of my help than my daughter, I quickly realized that checking them in online did not mean I could completely check out. Ways I have been involved with my children's e-classes have varied from being right there with my son to help him follow his teacher's instructions, to being available to my daughter when she did not understand something, to keeping in touch with a teacher about assignments, to making sure I understood enough of Latin, for example, to help my daughter with her homework. E-classes make some things more accessible, but it does not relieve me as a homeschool parent of my ultimate responsibility.

Check back in over the next few days to see how our specific classes worked and what kinds of learners and family situations they would be good for!