I cannot wait to show you the books that I got from Memoria Press last month.

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Disclaimer: Memoria Press sent me a box filled with curriculum to use with my three kids (three?!?!) in exchange for some posts on my blog (yay!). You can trust that all opinions are my own and that my blog posts will be a true reflection of our experience. There will be a few follow-up posts throughout 2018/2019 so that I can share how the curriculum works out for us over the year.

Right now I’m 100% in the honeymoon phase and I’m madly in love with everything Memoria Press sent.

My kids are so sick of me gleefully dragging them into the homeschool room to rummage through piles of student workbooks and teacher guides and flashcards. But I can’t help it. Curriculum to a homeschool mom is like coffee to a … homeschool mom. OK, homeschool moms love a lot of things, I guess.

Wait — Memoria Press? Isn’t that a classical curriculum? If you’ve been following my blog for the last few years, you might be confused. Click on back to my previous post — I wrote about how we started out this past school year with Charlotte Mason, switched over to a living books curriculum right before Christmas, and then discovered Memoria Press in the spring. After reading every last page on their website, I bought a few of their books to try out with my girls and I was so impressed with it all: the glossy covers, the clean layouts, the clear instructions for sleep-deprived parents. And everything just works so well for us — even for Harbour, who has really struggled with school up until this point.

In fact, before I show you the books that Memoria Press sent me, let me show you the ones that I bought a few months ago. These are the books that ultimately won me over to their curriculum and their educational philosophy.

Memoria Press Kindergarten

Harbour has been using the First Start Reading set, the Kindergarten Enrichment Guide, and the Simply Classical Recitation schedule for a couple of months now. I’m delighted with them all.

First Start Reading by Memoria Press

There are five student books in the First Start Reading (FSR) series, plus a big teacher’s guide. We are nearing the end of the first book, FSR-A, which focuses mostly on the consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words that have an “a” in the middle. You know: mat, had, nap, etc.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure about buying yet another reading program. We’d already tried All About Reading, Logic of English, and Reading Lessons Through Literature. They all either got too hard too fast, or the lessons themselves were so long that Harbour literally wandered off before we were even halfway done. Every. Single. Time.

First Start Reading has been slow and steady and never overwhelming; I can’t think of one single time that Harbour looked at a page in her book and just threw up her hands in defeat — which happened a lot in the past. We are actually making progress, and I can see her getting faster at recognizing words. It’s so exciting.

We’ll be working with these books straight through the summer. I wanted so badly to be finishing off FSR-D by September, but I know it’s not going to happen. It’s okay though. I’ll simply adjust next years’ curriculum guide to accommodate our progress. We’ll get there eventually.

Kindergarten Enrichment Guide from Memoria Press

In addition to First Start Reading, we’ve been using the Kindergarten Enrichment Guide. It is wonderful. It features 34 pictures books and has a week’s worth of lessons to go with each of them. It is absolutely the perfect curriculum for Harbour and I can’t say enough good about it.

I love the books that we’ve read so far. Some of my favourites have been Hubert’s Hair-Raising Adventure (hilarious), The Important Book (so sweet), and Frederick (charming). Oh, and How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World, of course. That book has been a long-time favourite at our house.

Each week’s lesson plan includes two parts: the literature part and the enrichment guide. Take How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World as an example.

Part One (the literature part) includes:

• an overview of the story
• an introduction to the author and the illustrator, Marjorie Priceman
• some pre-reading instructions (finding a map and looking up the countries that the baker will visit)
• vocabulary: 24 words to go over, like “ingredients”, “Sri Lanka”, and “acquaintance”
• discussion questions about the story and the pictures, complete with asterisks that tell me when to turn the page and how many pages to flip (I love that they do this for me)
• follow-up questions for after the story is finished
• a mini-language lesson (noting how proper nouns like country names required capitalization)

Part Two (the enrichment part) includes:

• History & Culture – this week is about countries: what they are and how to find them on a globe. There’s also a suggestion to bake an apple pie, which of course we did. By happy coincidence, we canned apples for River’s science lesson on that same day. Tastiest project day ever? I think so!
• Science – taste a variety of apples and make a tasting graph
• Art – look at Still Life with Apples by Vincent van Gogh
• Music – The Star-Spangled Banner. We skipped this one, given that we’re Canadian. I do like how the lesson covered proper etiquette during the anthem.
• Poetry – The Pledge of Allegiance. Again, we just chose another poem.

I love how full of ideas the Kindergarten Enrichment Guide is. It doesn’t feel overwhelming to me though. Sometimes I spread the vocabulary across all five days of the week. Sometimes we don’t squeeze in all five enrichment activities. I’m not worried about it, though. I’m just enjoying the richness that this guide has brought to our homeschool. I can’t wait to start on what Memoria Press has planned for us next year.

Speaking of next year … it’s time to show off the books we’ll be using! Let’s start with my three-year-old. He’ll be turning four in September, right in time to start Junior Kindergarten.

First, can I just tell you first how ridiculously excited Forest is? On Monday morning, he opened his eyes and insisted that we get started on his school lesson. I mean before he even got out of bed, he was demanding that we do school.

FOREST (Junior Kindergarten)

I’ve never used a Junior Kindergarten program before, and I have to laugh because it’s usually the first-time homeschooling moms that buy school books for their JKers. Most moms have given up on a JK “curriculum” by the third kid — they figure that counting worms in the garden is good enough, so please go do that already while I teach your sister long division, okay?!

Not me, though. I’m bucking the trend and doing JK with my last kiddo instead of my first. No, wait — okay, I did have a few Waldorf-inspired curriculums back when my two girls were younger, but those programs were super relaxed and, well, Waldorf-y: Go outside and play in the rain. Fairy tales are for everyone! Monday is purple. That kind of stuff.

It was nothing like the books that I have now. These are positively academic in comparison.

When I showed Forest the books last Friday, he looked at me with wide eyes and said in the most wonder-filled voice you can imagine, “I’ve been looking everywhere for my school books. I didn’t know they’d be in this box.” And then my heart melted and I promised we’d start school once the weekend was done. Which is why he insisted on Monday morning that we get a move on, I guess.

So why am I using an actual JK curriculum this time around? I discovered that while I’m great at piecing together school lessons on the fly when I’m just teaching just one kid, everything kind of falls apart when I have to teach two. Last year when Harbour started school, I learned that I really need a solid curriculum that does all of the thinking for me for both grades.

This year I’ll have three kids and I need to have as much planning done for me as possible. I mean, I know that Forest could just skip JK all together, but he wants to do school, and instead of spending two hours a week on Pinterest searching for half-way decent printables, I decided that it’s just easier to have everything done in advance.

This is what Forest will be using:

Memoria Press: Junior Kindergarten

Junior Kindergarten Curriculum Manual
Alphabet Book 1
Alphabet Book 2
Alphabet Coloring Book
Numbers & Colors Book
Numbers Coloring Book
My Very Own Scissors Book

Forest is absolutely enamoured with the scissors book. I seriously should have bought two because there is no way I’m going to be able to keep it away from him until September.

Part of me is a teeny bit worried that these books are too advanced for him, but if that’s the case, we’ll just adjust the activities. Instead of writing letters on paper, I’ll have him trace sandpaper letters with his finger, or paint over chalk letters with a paintbrush and water, or shape the letters with playdough. In my mind, Junior Kindergarten is still just for fun, so I’m not going to stress over it.

Harbour (Grade One)

Harbour will be doing Grade One in the fall. I seriously debated putting her in the Simply Classical stream, which is a modified curriculum that was created for kids who have learning disabilities. But does she have a learning disability or is she just a late starter? I don’t know yet. After going back and forth, I finally just called the Memoria Press office and spoke with a rep. She recommended that we use the main program until Harbour gets a formal diagnosis because it’s easier to switch from Memoria Press to Simply Classical than it is to go the other way. That’s fine. We’re going to use the Grade One curriculum instead of the Grade Two curriculum, and if I even find that’s too much, I won’t hesitate to slow the schedule down.

As it stands, we’ll probably be off to a late start with the reading and spelling books anyway. I’m trying to get through the first four First Start Reading books this summer, but I know now that they won’t be finished by September. That’s okay, though. We’ll keep plugging away and eventually things will get done.

This is what Harbour will be using:

Memoria Press: Grade One

• First Grade Curriculum Manual
• First Start Reading Book E, Student and Teacher Guide
• Traditional Spelling Book I Student and Teacher Guide
• StoryTime Treasures Student and Teacher Guide
• More StoryTime Treasures Student Guide and Teacher Guide
• Copybook I
• First Grade Enrichment Guide
• Book of Crafts, First Grade
• First Grade Art Cards

I made a few changes from the suggested package. I opted for Copybook I instead of the scheduled Copybook II, because writing is still hard and I’d like to start slower. I also decided to leave cursive until next year.

Harbour is most excited about the Crafts book; I’m most excited about StoryTime Treasures.

The Art Cards are really neat too. I think I’ll have to laminate them right away because they’ve already been handled by all three kids and I can see them getting bent and dirty pretty quickly.

River (Grade Six)

Forest and Harbour are pretty much using Memoria Press exclusively, but River will only be doing half of her lessons with them. It’s just that she’s doing so well with her current Latin and writing programs, and I don’t want to mess with success. Honestly, I’m a bit bummed about that, because the Memoria Press Latin curriculum looks amazing. Oh well, her Latin is just a two-year program — we can switch over after that. And next year we get to start Greek too!

The Memoria Press books that we are using this year includes the literature guides, the Famous Men of the Middle Ages, and the Christian Studies II. Normally in Grade Six, students do Christian Studies III, but since we’re just starting out, I thought we should start closer to the beginning. Not right “in the beginning” though — we’ve done Genesis and Exodus at least twice now. It looks like Book II starts with the Israelites going into Canaan with Joshua, and that sounds like a great place to start. I stupidly ordered the wrong flashcards though — oops! I’ll have to order the right ones when I buy more books.

After seeing the books in person, I’m sold on the idea of doing a few more. I’m considering both geography and science, because I like the content and, more than that, I like the pacing of the programs. The science program we’ve been using is great, but it has a lot to do every day. I need something simpler. Same for geography.

I’m still making my final decision. For the meantime, this is what we have for River so far:

Memoria Press: Grade 6

• Sixth Grade Curriculum Manual
• Adam of the Road Student and Teacher Guide
• The Door in the Wall Student and Teacher Guide
• Robin Hood Student and Teacher Guide
• King Arthur Student and Teacher Guide
• Famous Men of the Middle Ages
• Famous Men of the Middle Ages Student and Teacher Guide
• Christian Studies II Student and Teacher Guide
• New Testament Flashcards — whoops, I should have ordered the Old Testament

I am most excited about the literature guides — we haven’t done actual novel studies in homeschooling yet. I’m going to read the four novels over the summer so that I’m ready to discuss them in the fall. I’m guessing that River is going to enjoy Famous Men of the Middle Ages the most, given how much she’s enjoyed Famous Men of Rome recently.

I wish we could get started right away! To tide me over, I’ll be spending the next three months reading up on Classical Education, pre-reading the River’s literature and history novels, and searching for used copies of the books that Harbour and Forest need for their lessons.

September feels sooooo far away, though I’m sure it will come quickly. And I can’t wait.

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