Build a Stronger Vocabulary with Two Excellent Word Roots Programs

One regret I have about my own schooling growing up is that I didn't begin my study of Latin until my sophomore year of high school. By that point, I was already taking my PSAT's. While I am glad that I decided to study Latin at all (my parents were not particularly gung ho about it), I think I would have benefited from starting earlier had that been an option. My alma mater normally allowed 9th graders & above to enroll; in retrospect, I wish that I had tried to petition my way in as a 7th grader.

While I don't start my kids on Latin as young as some homeschoolers choose to (Miss Scarlet will probably begin in 5th grade), I do start them learning Latin roots by the time they are working at a mid-elementary level. Miss Scarlet has been working her way through Caesar's English 1 from Michael Clay Thompson. It's an excellent book- one that is engaging and intellectually challenging at the same time. One can really tell that Mr. Thompson loves words. The one drawback is that CE does not really have that much in the way of practice exercises. To beef up that aspect of word study, Miss Scarlet has been supplementing with the Red Hot Root Words workbook from Prufrock Press.

Yesterday, our second semester materials arrived. Among those were the second volumes of the Ceasar's English and Red Hot Root Words series. I was a bit disappointed to discover that virtually all of the roots covered in RHRW1 are repeated in RHRW2. The main difference between the two books is that in Vol. 1, each exercise covers only 1-2 roots vs. 3-4 in Vol. 2. Had I known this, I would've skipped the first RHRW book and just purchased the second.

I went through and made up a list of which lessons in CE1 and CE2 correlate with which practice exercises in RHRW2. Of the 101 roots covered in the two CE volumes, 45 are also in RHRW2. There are 125 additional roots in RHRW2 not covered in the CE series. Therefore, a student who completes all 3 books will have learned a grand total of 226 roots. There are 20 chapters in each of the CE volumes (the odd ones cover roots) and 54 lessons in RHRW2. Here are the correlations:

Caesar's English 1/Red Hot Root Words 2
Chapter 1- lesson 12, lesson 1, lesson 15, lesson 3, lesson 2
Chapter 3- lesson 14, lesson 17, lesson 9
Chapter 5- lesson 5, lesson 3
Chapter 7- lesson 27, lesson 33, lesson 20, lesson 39
Chapter 9- lesson 37
Chapter 11- lesson 31, lesson 6, lesson 8
Chapter 13- lesson 33
Chapter 15- lesson 23
Chapter 17- lesson 28, lesson 36, lesson 13
Chapter 19- lesson 27, lesson 11, lesson 16

Caesar's English 2/Red Hot Root Words 2
Chapter 1- lesson 9, lesson 6
Chapter 3- lesson 26, lesson 22, lesson 43
Chapter 5- lesson 2, lesson 11
Chapter 7- lesson 41
Chapter 9- lesson 27, lesson 36
Chapter 11- lesson 30, lesson 1, lesson 39
Chapter 13- lesson 6
Chapter 15- n/a
Chapter 17- lesson 7, lesson 37
Chapter 19- lesson 24, lesson 34