Reddit mentions of Scribblers, Sculptors, and Scribes: A Companion to Wheelock's Latin and Other Introductory Textbooks

I highly recommend Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata. It uses an immersion method where every word of the book is in Latin right from the beginning, and you gather the meaning of everything from the illustrations, the context, or notes in the margin indicating synonyms and antonyms. It works. The first volume, Familia Romana, focuses on the life of an upper-class Roman household with some digressions on the parts of the human body, the clock and calendar, life in the army, and other such subjects so that important vocabulary can be introduced. A classic 18th Century textbook of Bible stories in Latin, Epitome Sacrae Historiae, has been edited so it can be used in the series after Familia Romana. In the second main volume, Roma Aeterna, the difficulty ramps up sharply, because now you're starting to read real Latin that wasn't written for a textbook.

Nothing will be more beneficial to progress in Latin than having a little something to read and reread every day. Your mastery of a language is like a muscle. You exercise it every time you understand messages delivered to you in that language. So my recommendation is that you make time to read a chapter of LLPSI every day, and complete the exercises at the end of each chapter. If you run into difficulties, stop and reread, or even reread from the beginning of the book to reinforce what you've already mastered.

Alternatively, a good course using the traditional grammar-translation method is Henle Latin, a thoroughly Catholic course written by a Jesuit in the 1940s. To begin this requires two books, Henle Latin: Grammar which is used together with all four of the other books, and Henle Latin: First Year. In the first year, you learn the basics of Latin grammar and a mix of Christian words and words used frequently by Julius Caesar. Whatever course you choose, stick with it and do the exercises.

A good book for some light additional reading is Scribblers, Sculptors, and Scribes by Richard A. LaFleur, a collection of very short readings, mostly individual sentences, drawn from ancient Roman graffiti, inscriptions, and various literary sources chosen for their easiness and lack of obscenity. There is no more direct contact with the ancient world than reading the very words that someone carved into stone two thousand years ago, and this book gives you that experience of reading real Latin right away.

And there is plenty more to read on the Internet. Dickinson College Commentaries has ten Latin texts online with full vocabularies and excellent notes. Of these, the easiest are probably the two patristic texts (Bede and Sulpicius Severus) followed by the Life of Hannibal.

In addition, many excellent public domain Latin textbooks from the 19th and early 20th Centuries can be freely downloaded from Google Books and the Internet Archive, such as the following:

• Gildersleeve's Latin Grammar — If you can't find the information you need in Allen & Greenough, look in this book.
  
• Fabulae Faciles by Frank Ritchie — Four very easy retellings of Greek myths.
  
• Eutropius, edited by J. C. Hazzard — Eutropius' history of Rome is remarkably close in style to the literature of the Golden Age, and yet easier to read than any author from that period.
  
• Cornelius Nepos, edited by Thomas B. Lindsay — The easiest Classical author. His surviving works are a book of Lives of the Outstanding Generals of Foreign Nations, and portions of Kings of Foreign Nations and Roman Historians.
  
• Caesar's Gallic War, edited by Arthur Tappan Walker — Traditionally the first book of real Latin read by students because of its combination of simplicity of style, purity of style, and intrinsic literary interest. The received text of the Gallic War is in eight books, but this edition lacks the eighth because it was not written by Caesar.
  
• Select Orations of Cicero, edited by J. B. Greenough and G. L. Kittredge — Cicero's advice on how to improve your Latin is to read Cicero: orationem autem Latinam efficies profecto legendis nostris pleniorem. "You will assuredly make your command of Latin more complete by means of my writings." "The Citizenship of Archias" is not too difficult.
  
  Reading the publishers' advertisements in the front or back of these books and searching on Google Books or the Internet Archive will easily lead you to more books of this kind.

38 Latin Stories is definitely helpful to keep students interested! Some faculty member at my university also found a book called Scribblers, Sculptors and Scribes, which is based on Latin inscriptions and sentences from Latin authors similar to the Sententiae Antiquae. The inscriptions in particular are fun to read and decipher and it can help practice what will become a valuable skill if any students continue on to reading Latin inscriptions later.

http://www.amazon.com/Scribblers-Sculptors-Scribes-Companion-Introductory/dp/0061259187