Homeschool Crew Review: Poetry for the Grammar Stage from Memoria Press

Memoria Press is a family run company that publishes Classical Christian materials in a variety of subjects for homeschools and private schools.  Memoria Press curriculum is easy to teach and requires no previous knowledge of the subject being taught, but have high Academic Standards.  We have used several different products from Memoria Press and have been very impressed with all of them.  We recently had an opportunity to use and review Poetry for the Grammar Stage Set from Memoria Press.

For our review we received:

Poetry for the Grammar Stage Anthology
Poetry for the Grammar Stage Student Guide
Poetry for the Grammar Stage Teacher Guide

Poetry for the Grammar Stage is designed to be used with students in grades 3-7.  In this course, students will study and analyze 33 poems that increases in difficulty as you go through the book.  If used alongside Memoria Press literature, science and history courses it is a supplementary study intended to be completed over 4 years.  It can also be used as a stand alone course. As with most Memoria Press curriculum how it is used is very flexible.


The Anthology is a small paperback book that is 62 pages long.  This book contains just the poems being studied.  Some of the poems have black and white illustrations.

The Student Guide is a 160 page paperback book.  At the front of the book there is a section on How to Teach a Poem. Then the consumable workbook pages begin. All of the poems are included in the Student Guide.  Then there is a place for the student to draw a picture of each poem and a section for them to copy the poem.  Each poem has a vocabulary section listing some words and definitions that may be unfamiliar to the student.  Then there is an analyze section where the student labels the rhyme scheme of the poem and answers other questions like "Who is the speaker of the poem?" or "What figure of speech is used in the first stanza?" Next the student answers comprehension questions about the poem.  In the back of the book there is an appendix with a glossary and the history of Paul Revere's Ride.

The Teacher Guide is also a 160 page paperback book.  It contains all of the student guide ( I love that about Memoria Press!) with the answers included.

We have memorized poetry as a family for the last several years but have never studied or analyzed a poem so I was very interested in having an opportunity to review this set and use it with my 4th grade daughter alongside her language arts curriculum.  I was very thankful for the glossary in the back of the book as soon as we started.  Since we had never analyzed poetry before, and it has been just a few years since I was in school I needed a quick refresher on rhyme scheme.  It is included in the glossary along with some examples.

We spread the poems out over  our 4 day school week.  The first day we read the vocabulary and the definitions and read through the poem together.  The second day she illustrated the poem and completed the copy work.  The third day she read the poem again, underlined the rhyming words and worked on the Analyze section.  The last day she read the poem again and completed the comprehension questions. 

I love the set up of the Student Guide.  My Lily is artistic and loves to draw and color and she enjoyed having a place to illustrate the poems.  We do a lot of copy work and I like that there is a spot in the book for that as well.  I appreciate the vocabulary being included as there are unfamiliar words in the poems  (Have you ever called jacks jackstones?) Once we had a handle on what rhyme scheme was, it was fun to go back and underline and label the poems.  I think going through the comprehension questions help the students to gain a better understanding of what they have read.

I love the poems that were selected.  Some were very familiar to us such as The Spider and the Fly, Trees, Paul Revere's Ride, and All Things Bright and Beautiful, but many we had not read or studied before.  Some of the poems are fairly short 8-12 lines, while others are pretty lengthy 172 lines for the Lady of Shalott and 143 for Paul Revere's Ride.  With Lily being on the younger end of the age range for which this is intended, we plan on working slowly through the book completing a poem each month or so.  If I had a child who was on the older end of the range and using it as a supplement, I would move faster maybe even completing the entire course in a semester.  But as I said before Memoria Press products are very flexible and you can use it how it works best for you.

Once again I have found that Memoria Press has stood up to their goal of providing quality curriculum that is affordable and easy to teach.  Member of the Crew reviewed several different products from Memoria Press including Latin, other Poetry products and Classical Phonics.  To see what my Crew Mates had to say, stop by the Crew Blog!