Roman Roads Media - Picta Dicta Vocabulary Builder Review

Graduate of public school and finished most of my college classes, but never took any type of Latin.  We recently had a chance to review a program from Roman Roads Media called Picta Dicta Vocabulary Builder.  What an innovative way to learn and improve vocabulary and spelling.
We learn the extent of the Roman Empire in school, but how about the impact the Latin language makes on our own languages today?  I learned about prefixes and suffixes in school.  But to look at the context of the sentence or paragraph for meaning.  Had I been taught Latin in school, I may have had a better ability to decode vocabulary and words in my reading.  
Teaching Latin though is not easy.  I did not study it extensively, so to teach it can be a challenge.  And let's face it, my kids have a very short attention span.  So using a typical textbook style program is nearly impossible to make any progress with.  I was excited to get a chance to try out Picta Dicta Vocabulary Builder online program.  After using Picta Dicta Vocabulary Builder for a few weeks, gone are the textbooks for us!
Picta Dicta Vocabulary Builder is an online program that uses pictures to increase the memory retention needed while learning the Latin language.  Written for Jr High through Adults, Picta Dicta Vocabulary Builder focuses on basic reading skills and over 1000 Latin words.  It's uses a different approach with pictures.  
Now that might seem crazy, especially for me as an adult.  But when I started using Picta Dicta Vocabulary Builder I had just a very, very basic grasp of Latin.  I knew it was important to teach the kids, and why, but I didn't have a grasp on it.  
Enter me after a couple weeks.... I started recognizing English words in the Latin words popping up.  The words were read to me OR I simply clicked on the word and listened to the pronunciation.

After going through a series of pictures and words, the program asked me a series of multiple choice questions.  

Each level is broken down into Campaigns.  You work your way through the Campaign levels, until you finish the program.  The User Interface for Picta Dicta Vocabulary Builder is very user friendly.  If you are struggling with words, it repeats those words if you miss the questions.  So the program does adjust as you learn.  Picta Dicta Vocabulary Builder has roughly 31 chapters of learning materials that are broken up into 210 lessons.

There are also review games that you can click into and practice vocabulary cards within the games.  For short attention spans, you can make the lesson as long or as short as you need it to be.  I encourage her to finish each lesson in one time period, but some days we are able to Save and start back up later when she can concentrate more. 

I really love the fact that the program does not move at it's own pace.  There are so many online programs that move quickly between flashcards and levels.  With Picta Dicta Vocabulary Builder, a student (or adult in my case) can take the time to take notes and also have the material repeated as necessary for their own learning abilities.

When purchasing Picta Dicta Vocabulary Builder, the subscription is for 14 months, so plenty of time to finish the lessons.  You definitely would want to use Picta Dicta Vocabulary Builder at least 3 times a week to get the maximum benefit from the repetitive words.  Below is a video ad for the three Picta Dicta programs that are available from Roman Roads Media.

Lydia is starting to also use Picta Dicta Vocabulary Builder.  I wanted to use it for a little before I started her on the product fully.  I can see her spelling skills starting to improve for the upcoming spelling bee.  
Several members of the Homeschool Review Crew were given the opportunity to try various products from Roman Roads Media.  Click on the link below to see what they thought of the various Picta Dicta products.