It’s NOT Greek to Me! {Review}

Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.

I have been known to use the phrase, “It’s all Greek to me” now and then. While I would love to learn Greek, there are some things that, I admit, I am just not comfortable diving into! Greek being one of them. So imagine how thrilled I was, when I had the opportunity to review It’s NOT Greek to Me! from Ready to Teach. We received the Instructor’s Manual, a USB Flash drive with PowerPoint programs providing step-by-step instruction for each lesson, and also a Student Book. The books we received are softcover physical books; each one with 120+ pages.

I have one child in particular who is always asking, why a word is what it is. For this reason he did some studies in Latin a few years ago. Now it is time to dig into the Greek to satisfy his curiosity. In fact, he informed me recently that, about 60 percent of all English words have Greek or Latin roots – when you include the vocabulary of sciences and technology, the figure rises to over 90 percent. Pretty awesome I think!

So where do you start when you are beginning to learn Greek? This is an amazingly simple program to use – just open the books and start learning! The very first section (there are 5 sections in all) covers the background and suggested lessons plan for the morphemes lessons. There are also some really good ideas for creating a display (visuals can really help the learning process, right?).

This course is about so much more than just obtaining a Greek vocabulary. This is a program that combines reasoning, analysis, speech presentation, reading strategies and using the dictionary (am I the only one who gets excited about that?). The focus of this program is on knowledge and assessment as well as community and individual learner. Whether the student is a visual, auditory or tactile/kinesthetic learner these lessons involve them all.

“Research demonstrates that our brains learn and remember more with paper and pencil writing than with keyboarding.”

There is little that is more encouraging to me than a program that has a page entitled, “Weekly Assignments in the Proverbial Nutshell.” As we have been slowly remodeling inside our house, as I have been slowly, trying to minimize our stuff, I have a greater appreciation for materials that I can open up and start learning with.

The Student book is approximately 112 pages; these pages have lots of fun activities to help grow understanding that lasts. There are twelve lessons in all; each one incorporates from 15 to 22 Greek morphemes, lessons building upon one another. The crossword puzzles were a fast favorite of ours. There are also some passages to read words being learned in their context.

I will admit we had some difficulty with the USB drive since we do not own Microsoft Office Powerpoint.  We did using a few other other powerpoint programs we found but unfortunately none of them were able read the drive – including Open Office, which is what we use mostly.  I did sign up for the free trial of Microsoft Office so that I could use the lessons on the thumb drive but once the trial ends, since we will not be purchasing the program, I fear we will not be able to access the slides for these lessons anymore.

We do plan to continue with this, perhaps using lessons more slowly than the recommended five days a week. I am looking forward to completing this program with my son. Perhaps this will even lead us into a deeper learning of Greek language as well. I can also see us going through this program a second time since the readings and activities really are such wonderful ways to further cement learning.

Perhaps the best thing about this course is how simple and gentle it guides you through the many morphemes. With a variety of activities and tools, whatever style of learning your student may be best suited to, this program has something for them.  This is about so much more than simply learning Greek – gain a greater vocabulary, stronger analytical skills and watch as they learn how to recognize and access the knowledge they have gained from their studies.

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