Maridel Willer

Memoria Press
www.MemoriaPress.com

The initial voyage of the TOS Homeschool Crew is just about over! One of the last product shipments that I received was 2 items to review from Memoria Press: Prima Latina and New American Cursive Handwriting.

Prima Latina Review:

My children were both interested in learning Latin and were actually excited to get started with these lessons. We decided to do one lesson per week on Monday mornings and have completed 3 lessons so far. We have learned quickly and the children have been amazing daddy with their knowledge when he gets home.

Prima Latina is a first course in Latin, designed for K through 3rd, though I believe that some 4th and 5th graders with no Latin experience would also enjoy this curriculum. It is so easy to use and mom does not need a bit of experience with Latin to jump right in and learn alongside of the children.

But wait, some of you are probably thinking, “Why teach Latin at all, especially in elementary school? Memoria Press has some great articles on their website that explain the benefits of learning this so-called “dead language’. Here are a few quotes from the articles by Cheryl Lowe on the Memoria Press website:

“The most practical reason for Latin study is that it also teaches English. Over half of our English words are really Latin words—and it’s not just any half, it’s the difficult half! The common 1-2 syllable words of everyday speech are English, but the big, 3-5 syllable words are usually Latin. These are the words students start to see in their reading in science, history, and literature beginning in the third and fourth grade.”

“Latin is the mother tongue of Western civilization. Because it has been the language that has transmitted our cultural heritage for over 2,000 years, it pulls together language arts, history, geography, culture, art, architecture, music, values, religion, government, science, and math. Everything in the modern world seems to be related to Latin and the ancient and medieval cultures that spoke it. By examining the roots of our culture in its mother language, knowledge begins to integrate itself naturally.”

From the Product Description:
Prima Latina was developed for young children who are still becoming familiar with English grammar. The program provides 25 lessons, each including a grammar skill, 5 vocabulary words with corresponding English derivatives, a practical Latin phrase, and one line of a prayer that is learned in totality over five lessons.

The Prima Latina Text Set comes with a Teacher Manual, Student Book and a Pronunciation CD for $32.95. Videos and Flashcards are also available.

New American Cursive Handwriting Review

This is a basic introduction to forming letters in cursive, designed to be used with children as young as 1st grade. The letters are practiced by tracing fairly large patterns. The strokes that form the letters are marked with on the example at the top of the page. There is a cute animal, Mr. Meerkat, on most of the pages who adds a bit of humor to the lesson.

Writing complete words and sentences are not included in this book, just the basic formation of the capital and small case cursive letters. This top bound spiral book works well for left or right handed students and an explanation of proper body and hand positions are included.

I think that it is important for our children to learn cursive writing. I have heard that many public schools are beginning to drop cursive from their curriculums. Don’t you think that it is important for your children to be able to read their letters from Grandma, and copies of historical letters in a museum? Beautiful, legible writing is still going to be appreciated in the years to come.

The cost for this book is $22.95.

www. TapestryofGrace.com

By far the most extensive product that I have received to review for the TOS Crew is the history curriculum Tapestry of Grace by Lampstand Press. After using the curriculum for well over a month, I think I finally have my arms around it well enough to write this review.

I am truly grateful for all of the publishers who have created quality history curriculums that are written from a Christian worldview. We have a strong history focus in our homeschool and in the past I have researched and/or used Truthquest History, My Father’s World, Beautiful Feet and Sonlight, as well as many smaller unit study products.

This is my first experience with TOG (Tapestry of Grace), which has its own unique place in the world of history curriculum options.

TOG is a literature based classical Christian curriculum that is organized to teach history chronologically, on a 4 year cycle. That means that you would repeat this cycle 3 times over a 12 year period, at a higher level of reading and understanding each time the time period is studied.

The subjects that are included in TOG include world history, literature, geography, church history, writing , philosophy (upper grades only) and hands-on activities. This is a comprehensive curriculum, so you would really only need to add math, plus any electives that you might want to cover.

The curriculum is divided into 4 years, with 4 independent units for each year. Each unit covers assignments for 4 different levels that cover grades K through 12. The four levels are organized according to the Classical learning approach: Lower Grammar (K-3), Upper Grammar (3-6), Dialectic (6-9) and Rhetoric (9-12).

Each unit includes 9 weekly plans, for a total of 36 weeks per year. There are more than enough suggestions for each week. Most families will want to select only a few of the activities and books recommended, or take longer than 1 week to complete the work. A daily plan is not provided, so some planning will be required after making the decisions of which books and activities to include.

The units can be purchased individually or in full year bundles. There are 2 options for purchasing this product, a printed version that comes in large binders, or a digital edition (called DE) which is an online license for the curriculum that you can access and print for yourself as often as you like. The cost per year is as follows: $170 for the DE or $225 for the printed version. If you have never used TOG before, I would recommend getting the print version. Once you get used to how the curriculum works, you might consider purchasing just the DE for future years.

I found that there was a longer learning curve for the parent/teacher than I am used to when starting a new curriculum, and part of that was trying to figure out how to navigate the large number of pages in a digital format.

We chose to review Year 3 because that corresponded to where we were in our American History studies to date. So far we have reviewed 2 sections of Year 3 Unit 1(Napoleon’s World): week 3 - “Early Industrial Revolution” and week 6 - “Madison and the War of 1812.” Although these are planned to be covered in 1 week, we prefer a more relaxed schedule, so we have been taking 2 to 4 weeks to complete a 1 week section of TOG.

Here’s my take on what I liked about TOG, and a description of the areas that I needed to adjust so I could tailor it to suit our family.

WHAT I LIKED ABOUT TOG

1. I loved the essay that was included on “Why Study History”.

2. Studying history chronologically makes the most sense to me.

3. We agree with the TOG approach of using real books, rather than textbooks, for real learning.

4. The multi-level approach is convenient and cost effective, especially for larger families.

5. The assignments were appropriate for the recommended levels.

6. Their customer support is excellent and there are many helpful resources on the website.

7. You can interact with other families who use TOG in the online forum.

8. Most of the recommended books were available through my local library system.

9. Recommendations for optional supplemental resources are included.

10. We found that most (but not all) of the recommended books were well written and appropriate for our family.

11. An optional lapbook is available for each unit, which fits in with our usual schooling methods.

12. I appreciated the recommendations of classic literature selections for the time periods, as this is not always included in other history curriculum.

13. The discussion questions for the 2 upper levels are very good. The lower 2 levels do not include discussion questions.

14. A brief but thorough overview of each time period is included.

WHAT I NEEDED TO ADJUST TO MAKE IT WORK FOR US

1. The way that TOG is organized is geared toward the parent assigning most of the reading to the students, who work independently at their own levels, then discuss later. Having only 2 children who are close in age, I prefer to read aloud the majority of the books and discuss them real time. This allows me to learn right along with the children and is great bonding/snuggle time.

2. Since I was choosing books to read aloud, rather than assign, I found that I sometimes preferred resources that were listed in the Dialectic level, rather than the Grammar levels that correspond to my children’s ages.

3. One limitation with TOG and other history curriculums that use real books is that they only recommend books that are currently in print. I have found that children’s books written before 1960 are often better written and more historically accurate than today’s versions. The TOG unit we reviewed did recommend several wonderful older books that have come back in print. Because of our passion for the older books, I replaced some of the other TOG recommendations with books from our own shelves, or ones that were listed in the Truthquest history guides and were available through our library. I have heard of other families that combine TQ (Truthquest) and TOG for this reason.

4. A couple of the recommended books had content that I found to be not appropriate for my children. The teacher’s information section of TOG did include warnings about content in these books and suggested that the parent should screen them before deciding if it was right for their family. Unfortunately, I did not read that warning ahead of time before one of my children had picked up and read one of the books from the library pile that I would have preferred not to use.

5. The pace of TOG was too quick for us. We would rather linger a bit more and read a few (or a lot) more books for each time period, so we would definitely not be able to complete the 4 year cycle 3 times.

6. We prefer to focus on American history in the early years and wait until later to cover the more controversial topics of world history. If we decide to use TOG Year 1 on ancient times, we would wait until our children were age 10-12 or older and then take 2 years to complete each of the 4 TOG plan years only completing the chronological cycle 1 time.

OTHER THINGS TO CONSIDER ABOUT TOG

1. The upper 2 levels of assignments include a lot more “meat” than the 2 grammar levels. So, the real bang for the buck in this product is the content for the Dialectic and Rhetoric ages. Because of this, it is recommended that families start using TOG when their oldest child is 5th grade or higher.

2. Some of the resources listed may not be available in your library, so you will have additional cost for them or need to replace with another resource. Lampstand Press carries all of the resources on their website.

3. If you want to fully utilize the writing portion of this curriculum, you will most likely need to purchase the optional Writing Aids resource to further describe the writing assignments .

4. Both the DE and print versions of this product may not be re-sold, so you will need to consider that in your education budget.

5. As this is a complicated and unique product, I highly recommend that you download one of the samples at www.TapestryofGrace.com and use it for a few weeks to try it with your family before deciding to purchase a full year.

Five in a Row, Volume 3
www.fiveinarow.com

Five in a Row is a popular literature based curriculum with products for PreK through Jr. High. As a TOS Crew member, I was asked to review Five in a Row Volume 3, which is designed for 4 to 8 year olds.

We had previously used the preK volume, Before Five in a Row, the first year that we began homeschooling. It was a lot of fun for my children, who were 2 and 4 at the time.

The FIAR (as it is often abbreviated) guides each cover about 15 books, with suggested activities to cover the following topics for each book: Social Studies, Language Arts, Math, Art and Science. The introduction in the guide is very helpful in explaining how to use this curriculum. It is recommended that you read the book you are studying every day for 5 days, and then do one or more of the suggested activities. You can also purchase a Christian Character and Bible Study Supplement that covers all 3 guides.

FIAR can be used as your primary curriculum, but you will want to add more math than what is included in the guides. Another way to use it is as a supplement to other curriculums that you are using. If you want to use the FIAR method on just a single book, perhaps to go with a history or other unit study, you can download individual studies for a lower cost than purchasing a whole book.

Volume 3 of FIAR contains several books that we had never read before. We chose to study the book “Warm as Wool” because it was in the time period that we are studying right now (Westward Expansion of the US in the 1800’s). It is a wonderful story about having vision, enduring trials and the rewards of a strong work ethic and it also gives a good picture of what life was like for settlers and homesteaders. Here is the list of some of the things we studied along with this book: Social Studies – relationships, suffering, character, geography, covered wagons, log cabins; Language Arts – descriptive language, similes; Art – banjo music; Science – Sheep.

We did not read the book 5 days in a row, but found that we covered the information fine in just 2 days. My children are ages 8 and 10, so this curriculum is quite a bit simpler than our normal studies. The activities are primarily things that you read and discuss together, without any writing assignments.

I would recommend Five in a Row for anyone looking for literature studies based on excellent picture books. This curriculum is best suited for children who are not yet reading on their own.

Apologia Review – Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day
www.apologia.com

Apologia’s Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day is the very first textbook that we have ever used in our homeschool. When we received the review copy, I was impressed by the way that it was written and its overall quality. It is definitely NOT a typical (boring) science text.

At first, I thought this course might be a bit too detailed for my children who do enjoy nature and science, but seem to prefer history and literature as their “main course” for school. After I opened the package, my daughter immediately started reading the book on her own and called her younger brother over to look at the pictures. When I saw how interesting it looked, I decided that I wanted to read it aloud and discuss with them.

We tend to follow a relaxed unit study approach using real books for most of our learning. I decided to use this textbook as a “spine” to do a unit study on birds, adding literature, lapbooking and notebooking to the study. (You can purchase lapbooking and notebooking products to go with the Apologia books at www.knowledgeboxcentral.com.) We also included history by reading a biography of J. Audubon.

This book arrived right after we finished a unit study on Lewis and Clark, so it was good timing in for us to be able to practice observing and recording information about birds, just as the Corps of Discovery did on the trail. We even were able to plan a camping trip and have some knowledgeable friends teach us how to listen for birds, spot them with binoculars and identify the species.

Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day covers much more than birds – it also includes chapters on bats, insects and flying reptiles/dinosaurs. We have been able to complete most of the chapters that cover birds in just over a month, and will probably take a break before continuing the rest of the course later this year. I am planning on purchasing the other books in this series: “Water Creatures” and “Land Animals”.

Some of the things that I like about this science text are:

1. It is well written, speaking directly to the student. It works well for a fluent reader to read on their own, and is interesting enough for a parent to read aloud and discuss it with multiple age groups.

2. The author writes from a creationist perspective, glorifying God and cultivating wonder in His creation.

3. It includes an introduction to Zoology, including animal classification and habitats. Reading about how scientists use Latin names gave my children an interest in learning Latin! (Look for my review of Prima Latina from Memoria Press later this month!)

4. The experiments are easy to do, use basic things you probably have around the house, and are fun and informative.

5. Charlotte Mason type activities are included, such as narration prompts and notebooking suggestions.

6. You can use this book according to the recommended schedule, or follow your own schedule.

7. The book is interesting enough to keep on your bookshelf as a reference after you have completed the course.

I highly recommend Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day and the other Apologia science books in this series.