New Latin, Greek curriculum takes root in Pittsburgh-area parochial, charter schools
ELIZABETH BEHRMAN
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
DEC 26, 2017



Seven-year-old Damien’s yellow pencil flew across his worksheet, the Christmas tree eraser on the end bobbing as he wrote.

The rest of his first-grade class sped through their vocabulary lesson alongside him. As their teacher, Sister Cynthia Wessel, guided them last week, the class broke down words like “cardiac” and “dentist” into their Greek and Latin roots like “cardi,” “dent” and “ist.”

Damien quickly determined the meanings of other words like “hyperactive,” “cardiologist” and “pedicure.” His hand was first in the air when Sister Cynthia asked if anyone knew what “centipede” meant: 100 feet.

“I wanted to develop the vocabulary for our kids, and I thought this was the perfect way to do it,” said Sister Cynthia, principal of St. Agnes Catholic School in West Mifflin.

St. Agnes is one of seven or eight parochial schools in the Pittsburgh area that have started using the Latin and Greek Roots Challenge curriculum from The Rooted Mind. This is the second year that all 101 St. Agnes students in kindergarten through eighth grade have used the program.

“The whole goal here is if you can have students understand roots and root meaning, and they can identify them, when they come across words they don’t know, they can break it down and understand it,” said John Riley, who founded the company with his wife Maureen in 2010.

They originally created the program for their own parochial school in Natick, Mass., Mr. Riley said. He has a background in finance and his wife is trained as a nurse, but they are both passionate about education and wanted their three young daughters to have some Latin and Greek instruction at their school. When they couldn’t find a curriculum that was “just right,” Ms. Riley created one herself.

Now, more than 80 schools across the country — mostly parochial and charter schools — use the Latin and Greek Roots Challenge, Mr. Riley said.

“There’s lots of data about the impact of the classic languages on SAT scores and reading comprehension and vocabulary,” he said. “Kids were having fun, the teachers and the parents were excited about it and the word just started to spread.”

Jennifer Blank, the fifth- and sixth-grade language arts teacher at Holy Sepulcher Catholic School in Butler, said her students who struggle most with reading have benefited from the roots challenge in the two years the school has used it. Not only are they able to figure out more difficult and unfamiliar words on their own, they enjoy the puzzles and exercises that are part of the workbook assignments more than simply memorizing a word’s definition.

“A lot of kids that don’t normally like vocabulary like the way that it’s set up because it’s not as boring, per se, as it used to be,” Ms. Blank said. “It’s definitely a different approach.”

Mr. Riley said an estimated 60 percent of the English language can be traced to Latin or Greek origins. The ability to recognize those roots would be especially helpful to students pursuing further education in medicine, law or academia.

“There’s the richness of the English language that we sort of miss because we don’t understand the etymology,” he said.

http://www.post-gazette.com/news/edu...s/201712250007