Memoria Press is definitely a favorite in my house. They have so much to offer. My personal favorites are their Famous Men of Rome, Traditional Spelling, and now, also the Fifth Grade Literature Guide Set.
Olivia is in sixth grade this year, which is crazy because she’s my youngest. I can’t believe in a few short years she will be in high school!!
Anyway, even though she is technically in sixth grade, I chose to get her the fifth grade literature guide set because I liked the book selection for that set. Olivia has not read any of the books in the set, so I thought it would be a good way to check them off our list. I plan for her to finish the fifth grade set this semester and will do the 6th grade set next semester.
Each book in the literature guide sets are intended to take six to seven weeks, so we will have to work a little faster in order to get both grades done this year. That being said, I won’t rush it, but that’s what I’m hoping to accomplish.
Literature Guide Set
The Fifth Grade Literature Guide Set includes student study guides and teacher’s guides for three books:
- Lassie Come-Home Memoria Press Literature Guide
- The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe Memoria Press Literature Guide
- Heidi Memoria Press Literature Guide
You can purchase these sets individually, just the student book, or with the novel. You can also buy the set with all three novels or without the novels.
The student will work directly out of the student study guide. It is a consumable workbook meant for one child. If you wanted to use this with more than one child, you would need to get multiple notebooks.
There are two pages in the notebook for each chapter you read in the book. Beyond that, there are also quizzes and tests the student will take after so many chapters. Those are found in the teacher’s guide.
In addition to the quizzes and tests, the teacher’s guide has pages that look identical to the pages in the student workbook, except that the answers are filled in for you. At the end of the teacher’s guide, you will find answers to the discussion questions as well.
The student book does have 2 pages of teacher instructions, so I suppose you might be able to get away with not getting the teacher’s guide, but I wouldn’t recommend it. If you don’t get the teacher’s guide you are forced to do a lot of “studying” on your own. It would basically be as if you are taking the class.
I like being able to see what the intended answers are in the teacher’s guide. Also, sometimes it’s nice for my daughter to read the answers in the teacher’s guide to see how well-worded sentences should read. It helps expand her vocabulary and knowledge of sentence structure in a subtle way.
Daily Schedule
Honestly, this is one area I would like to change for Memoria Press. Most of the time when we use Memoria Press products, there is no clear cut lesson plan. I’m sure some parents like the leniency of that, but I would like to be told what to do each day. If I choose to change it up as the parent/teacher, then so be it, but I like to see how the curriculum writers intended it to be used.
What we did with these books is read a chapter a day (together) and then my daughter would complete the pages for that chapter. In hindsight, that seemed like it took a while each day so that’s probably not what was intended. I will be slowing down that schedule just a tad, but I’m not sure how just yet.
For each chapter, there are reading notes and vocabulary that you can go over before you read the chapter. This will help remind your child what is going on in the text so far. Plus help them recognize the vocabulary words when they encounter them while reading (or listening to you read).
Then there are comprehension questions to answer. After that, there are quotations from the book and discussion questions. Finally, there are enrichment questions and activities. For example, for the first chapter of Heidi, one of the enrichment activities was to locate the towns of Mayenfield and Dorfli on a map. I thought this was a fun activity. It gives real life to the story to see where these towns are on a map.
This is what one of the chapters of notebook pages looks like to give you a better idea:
We started with Heidi. Olivia has actually already seen the movie and it was interesting for her to see the differences. The grandfather is much nicer in the book than they make him out to be in the movie.
We look forward to reading the other two books as well. The layout of the student books appears to be the same, which is great because she and I won’t have to change our schedule for each book.
I do recommend you click the link below to check out this set or sets for other grades to see what you think!
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