Thursday, March 31, 2016

Memoria Press Second Grade Literature Guide Set Review

My family had the privilege of trying the Second Grade Literature Guide Set from Memoria Press for this review to use in conjunction with our own homeschool curriculum. This is a Schoolhouse Review Crew Review. All opinions expressed are my own or those of my family.



Memoria Press is a family-run publishing company that produces simple and easy-to-use classical Christian education materials for home and private schools. It was founded by a woman named Cheryl Lowe in 1994. They currently have preschool through ninth grade in most of their curriculum and some through twelfth grade. They also cover subjects in: Classical Core Curriculum, Latin, Classical Studies, Christian Studies, Logic & Rhetoric, Phonics & Early Reading, Penmanship, Literature & Poetry, American & Modern Studies, Writing & English Grammar, Science & Math, Greek, Modern Languages, Educational Resources, eBooks, Special-Needs, and Art & Music.


Memoria Press Second Grade Literature Guide Set with Novels

The Second Grade Literature Guide Set consists of five student guides and a teachers key for use with classical books that would be slightly above the average second grade readers comfort level. This is supposed to help challenge them and give them a deeper understanding and satisfaction of reading classical literature in turn developing the student into superior readers. The reading guides require one to read while having an active, perceptive mind that is challenged to think, compare, and contrast. The guides focus on vocabulary, spelling, comprehension, and composition skills. These student guides are all consumable workbooks and have Teaching Guidelines at the beginning to help you through each lesson. Each lesson correlates with a chapter in the book, some involving a part one and a part two. Some of the guides even have Honors Activity pages throughout them to go into even more depth into learning. You can get a feel for content by downloading one of their samples on the site. This set does not include the classical books, but you can purchase them separately or get the whole set with the novels from Memoria Press. All the guides go well together in this set because of their wonderful classical nature and references to America being settled and also the animals there.

Memoria Press Second Grade Literature Set.

Second Grade Literature Guide Set Contents:
  • Animal Folk Tales of America Student Study Guide (19 pages, 14 chapters)
  • Prairie School Student Study Guide (17 pages, 8 chapters and an appendix)
  • The Courage of Sarah Noble Student Study Guide (33 pages, 11 chapters, and 3 honors activities)
  • Little House in the Big Woods Student Study Guide (52 pages, 13 chapters - some with two parts, and 4 honors activities)
  • Tales from Beatrix Potter Student Study Guide (23 pages, 4 tales)
  • Second Grade Literature Teacher Key (spiral bound, printed with 2 pages of student guide per page of key)

Little House In The Big Woods Student Study Guide and Book.

How We Used This and Our Thoughts:

Memoria Press was very generous in sending us the entire 2nd grade level set, even though they knew I would not use more than one book title during the review period. For this review I picked out the book Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder to use with the Little House in the Big Woods Student Guide and Second Grade Literature Teacher Key. I was fortunate enough to already have had it on my shelf and my children had not read it yet. The Teacher Key, which had all of the answers in it for all the Student Study Guides in the 2nd grade set was a tremendous help and even though I too decided to read the book along with my daughter I could see that you could use it even without reading the book yourself.

Teela doing the Little House in the Big Woods Student Study Guide.

My daughter, Teela, is in second grade so naturally we used this with her. I wanted to also know what was going on in the book so I read each chapter before she did. We went chapter by chapter through the book this way. After each chapter we would work in the Little House in the Big Woods Student Study Guide on the pages that correlated with the chapter we just got done reading. Some of the chapters had a part one and a part two in the student study guide. The student study guide is a consumable workbook and this particular one was the longest in the set with 52 pages. Teela did exceptionally well with the reading, vocabulary, and comprehension. She needed a little help on the composition part of it because of sentence structure. I did not do any of the Honors Activities with Teela yet because I wanted to make sure we would have time to do the rest of the Student Study Guide. However, the enrichment activities, like learning more about Wisconsin, making butter in a baby food jar, learning the steps of sugar making, making a Picture Quilt, and planning a "Dance at Grandpa's", sounded like a lot of fun. The enrichment activities include composition, copywork, dictation, research, mapping, drawing, poetry work, literary terms, etc. We will come back to these and do them too.

Little House In The Big Woods Student Study Guide Layout and Book.

I was amazed at how complex these Student Study Guides were. The questions were very well thought out and challenged my daughter to think a lot more for each answer than she is used to. The Teaching Guidelines at the front of the Student Guide was very helpful at showing us what the sequence of things should be. It says to first review previous chapter plots, characters, settings, vocabulary before reading each consecutive chapters. Then after the review of the previous chapters you are to look at the study guide and preview what is in it for the next chapter you will be reading. While the student reads they are to make note of the vocabulary words in the guide and where the comprehension questions that come up are. After reading you do the student guide with your student. It says that second graders should have help occasionally to come up with synonyms and forming good sentences orally before writing them down. Each lesson has sections on Pronounce & Spell, Vocabulary, Activity, and Comprehension Questions.

I highly recommend the Memoria Press Second Grade Literature Guide Set to anyone who is homeschooling or doing supplemental work at home. These Literature Sets would also be great during Summer Vacation if you don't homeschool. The classical education is some of my favorite literature curriculum in my eclectic homeschool ways. Everything that I have tried so far from Memoria Press I have loved. They have wonderful curriculum for k-12 homeschooling. Thanks again Memoria Press for being so generous in giving us the opportunity to look over the whole set. We can't wait to start The Courage of Sarah Noble next in this set!!

BUY IT
Second Grade Literature Guide Set with Novels is $115 and without Novels is $65.

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Memoria Press Literature Guides Review

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