Power-Glide
Latin for Kids
French for Kids
by Robert Blair
Reviewed by Martha Robinson
Purchase details:
Power-Glide Children's French consists of: Parent Guide (160 pages), Student workbook (143 pages), and 4 CD's. Suggested Retail of $99.95. Please support HomeschoolChristian.com by buying this program from our Amazon affiliate link.
Power-Glide Children's Latin consists of: Parent Guide (150 pages), Student workbook (129 pages), and 4 CD's. Suggested Retail of $99.95. Please support HomeschoolChristian.com by buying this program from our Amazon affiliate link.
Summary: Power-Glide's children's courses are available in Spanish, French, German, and Latin. I had the opportunity to review Children's French and Children's Latin. These programs are a fun supplement or introduction for early elementary ages not ready for the rigor of an academic type program.
French
Children's French includes a Parent's Guide (160 pages), workbook (143 pages), and 4 CD's with a total of about 4 hours of audio. The format for Power-Glide's children's courses is an adventure in which your child is asked to imagine himself participating. The French adventure involves searching for treasure on a tropical island. To find the treasure, the child and his/her friends on the tape must learn some French words and phrases. Along the way, the children meet people from several different French speaking countries and information about those countries is provided.
The Parent's Guide contains pictures of each page of the workbook, instructions for the workbook page, and a complete audio transcript. A few cooking activities are suggested. The program offers activities for all learning styles through "frames" (choosing the answer among pictures), coloring, drawing, and story telling. The diglot weave technique, in which a story is told in a mixture of French and English, is used to encourage children to use the French words they know to begin speaking right away. Vocabulary, a total of about 160 words and phrases, includes greetings, parts of the body, animals, shapes, and colors. There is a comprehensive review at the end of the program.
Our experience: Power-Glide's Children's French received a mixed review at our house. It is excellent at capturing the attention of younger students. My children, ages 6 and 9, enjoyed the adventure and retained some of the vocabulary. They also were able to tell the stories fairly well after one listening. Both of my children who tested this are readers and I do not think this program would be good for a pre-reader unless an adult or older sibling sat with him/her. I prefer native French speakers and I was disappointed with the accents in some of the characters on this program. I also feel that the narrators gave the answers to questions too quickly after posing them. On the other hand, this program is great at creating interest and enthusiasm and could be a really fun way to get started before beginning serious foreign language study.
Latin
Children's Latin is very similar to Children's French. It includes a Parent's Guide (150 pages), workbook (129 pages), and 4 cassette tapes with a total of about 4 hours of audio. In this slightly different adventure, the children go through a partially submerged cave at low tide and end up on the inaccessible side of the island where the inhabitants speak Latin.
The activities in Children's Latin have little variation from the French program. The Latin program has one less diglot weave ("The Farmer and the Turnip") than the French program, resulting in a reduced number of vocabulary words, and does not include recipes. For obvious reasons, the Latin program is missing the cultural component of describing countries that have Latin speaking populations. Children's Latin uses classical pronunciation.
Our experience: PowerGlide's Children's Latin program also gets a mixed review from our family. I think Latin, being an inflected language, is much more difficult to teach using PowerGlide's "get them talking" technique. The narrator gives more time to answer in the Latin program, but the classical pronunciation caused my older child, who has already done a year of Latin with ecclesiastical pronunciation, some giggles! Children's Latin has definite value for creating or increasing enthusiasm prior to starting serious study. It also would be a fun supplement for summer months or car trips. As a program requiring no prior knowledge of Latin, Children's Latin is also good for home schooling moms who are nervous about getting started with Latin studies.
HomeschoolChristian.com resources related to this review:
Latin Curricula Comparison Chart to help select an introductory or intensive program.
HomeschoolChristian.com's Classic Languages Resource Section
HomeschoolChristian.com's Modern Languages Resource Section
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