Dear Mama,
We used Minimus and Minimus Secundus here, and I found the teacher's books very helpful to have; you could manage without them if you know some Latin yourself, but they have lots of interesting background information, some good ideas for doing Latin "across the curriculum," and some fun worksheets.
Also don't miss taking a look at the Minimus website, where there are some good games and other fun activities. We also ordered both sets of minibooks, which I'd recommend, too.
Minimus is designed to segue into Cambridge Latin, which also has lots of online resources.
Trillium, maybe I'll just tell a little bit about what else we've looked at here, and if you have any more questions, do let me know. We didn't follow Minimus Secundus up with Cambridge, but switched to Hans Oerberg's Lingua Latina (part one is called Familia Romana), which we are loving (Harpo [9] and Groucho [7] and I are working through this quite slowly; it's too old for Chico [5]). It's "direct method" Latin--it's all in Latin, the vocabulary definitions, the grammar explanations, everything--it's written absolutely brilliantly, in my estimation. The story is interesting, and very witty in spots. There are also lots of teacher helps available from the publisher (Focus).
Other things we have around here (for fun, for later, for I didn't know how else to spend my birthday money last year...) are Latin via Ovid (Wayne State University Press), which looks quite good to me; Esopus Hodie (available from the American Classical League, in two volumes), which we have liked for some extra reading practice; Learning Latin through Mythology (Hanlin and Lichtenstein, from Cambridge, too), also good reading practice; and Rose Williams's The Young Romans, which I also like. All but the Latin via Ovid (which is a university text) are aimed at youngish learners, but are not juvenile.
Just as an aside, there's a great blog by someone called Latinteach who has lots of informative posts about choosing curriculum, various contests one can enter, and so on. It's at
http://latinteach.blogspot.com/Hope this helps a bit!
peace
minnie
ETA: I should say that Lingua Latina is of course not really meant for 9 year olds, but we have found that it works pretty well if you don't try to go too fast (my kids all just had their birthdays, so we actually spent the 8/6 year on it, not the 9/7, and it was fine). They both have a pretty good grasp of grammar from their English and French studies (they have done some work on word roots, too), so they had a bit of a head start on some of the points that came up in LL. I am no Latin expert, though, and defer to the expertise of others here who obviously are!
