Poetry & Short Stories with Memoria Press – Review

My Little Man was slated to study some classical literature this semester, so we were excited for the opportunity to review the Poetry and Short Stories: American Literature Set from Memoria Press.

This set comes with a student workbook, a book full of short stories and poetry, and a teacher’s guide.

At first glance, our favorite aspect of the product was the literature book itself.  My son loves reading literature of all kinds, and he was excited to read the selections in this book.  We knew many of these already and wanted to dig deeper into them.  The selections are from the 19th and 20th centuries, and there are wonderful authors included:  Emily Dickinson, Carl Sandburg, O. Henry, Whittier, Longfellow, Poe, Frost, and more.  Most of the selections are very well known, and there’s a fair mix of short stories and poetry.  

In the workbook, each selection of literature has a chapter, and each chapter is broken into four parts: Pre-Grammar and Preparation, Grammar and Presentation, Logic/Dialectic, and Rhetoric/Expression.  

The Pre-Grammar and Preparation questions are very straightforward.  They ask the student to make predictions and connections to personal experience, much as I would expect from pre-reading activities.

The Grammar and Presentation questions are similar.  In this section, vocabulary words are defined and literary elements are explained and identified within the selection.  The questions in this section aren’t easy, but they are clear with specific, correct answers.  The literary elements selected are not the ones you see commonly listed, and the poetry selections routinely deal with rhyme scheme and meter.  They include more obscure ones, beyond Shakespeare’s favorite of iambic pentameter, and so this provided a great way to teach these elements.

In the Logic/Dialectic section, things got a little harder.  This section often requires the student to make personal connections with the literature selection and then to provide evidence from that selection to support their statement.  Because these weren’t strictly opinion questions, but opinions about those tough literary elements and the skills provided from the Grammar section, My Little Man had to dig deep for these.  It was hard, but we enjoyed working through the toughest spots together, and he has learned a lot about classic literature from this section.

The Rhetoric/Expression section was different.  It contained some basic questions, like summarizing the entire selection, that are clear and straightforward.  Those are valuable questions.  The majority of this section, including leading questions from the Logic/Dialectic section, ask the student to identify and evaluate the Central One Idea.  My Little Man was very frustrated by this term and the questions that built up to it.  Although he can identify the main idea and the theme of a selection with relative ease, this new idea caused stress for all of us.  He did not enjoy this final section, the Rhetoric/Expression section, at all.

On the flip size, he loved the quizzes.  The literature book contains several selections by the same authors, and so they are grouped together with a quiz for that author’s work.  When I asked him to take the quiz, My Little Man got really excited.  He said, “A quiz?  I love quizzes!  Can I take it now?”  He did very well on the quiz, and the questions tested both understanding and comprehension.  It was fairly short but straightforward and was a good fit for the work done with that selection.

My Little Man is an advanced reader with wonderful comprehension and insight but on the young side, slightly, for this curriculum.  He’s also not a fan of worksheets but asked to use this curriculum based on the literature selection it contained, so to make this work for him, we read one selection each week.  He answered the questions in one section each four days of that week.  We tend to be away from home one day each week, so that worked really well for us.  If we were using this as his only literature curriculum, we would start this way and build up to doing a bit more each day, at least when the literature selections are short.

When previewing this curriculum, I was excited to see many British ballads included in the book that I loved in school and that I planned for My Little Man to study this year.  When we received the book, I was disappointed that there weren’t any study sections to accompany that literature.  I suppose it’s because those are British selections in a book of American poetry and short stories, but since they’re included, I would have liked to see at least some sort of matching exercise.

I think that this curriculum would be perfect for those wanting a rigorous, classical education.  The questions require depth and study, as well as specific, academic knowledge of advanced literary elements.  If that’s the kind of education your student desires, then Memoria Press has the curriculum for you.

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