• Dear 3rd Grade, 4th Grade, and 5th Grade parents, 
• Last post/email, I described one of the core Latin skills we have been working on this year. 
• That skill is called conjugation: finding the stem of any Latin verb in our primer, adding the personal endings, and translating all the forms created. 
• In fourth grade and fifth grade, we have also been working on declension—the formation of Latin nouns.
• Nouns do not show action like verbs, so noun endings do not tell us who is doing the action.
• Noun endings tell us how the noun is being used in the sentence.
• For example, Latin word for “forest” is silva,  the stem is silv-.
• If “forest” is doing the action of the sentence—The forest is large.—the ending used is “-a”—Silv-a est magna. 
• But if “forest” is receiving the action in the sentence—I look at the forest—the ending used is “-am”—Spect-o silv-am.  
• This can seem needlessly  complex to speakers of English, since English sentences mostly use word order to convey such things.
• But noun and verb endings actually help students understand grammar more easily, since the actual look of the word changes depending on how it's being used in the sentence.
• The word on its own indicates its grammatical function.  
• So that is the second core Latin skill.   More in a few days. 

-Mr. Grimm