As a classical homeschooling family who leans to the Charlotte Mason side and uses quite a bit of Memoria Press curriculum in our yearly studies, Memoria Press is one of the homeschooling companies that I drool over on their website and print magazine. We are quite familiar with Memoria Press and the whole array of products they offer. 

Memoria Press is a family-run publishing company that was founded by Cheryl Lowe in 1994. The company creates simple, easy-to-use classical Christian educational curriculum for private schools and home educators all over the world. Memoria Press produces many popular Latin, science, logic, literature, and classical studies courses for children in PreK-12th grade. Their products are written and field tested with the students who attend the highly acclaimed Highlands Latin School. We were blessed to receive The Book of Trees Set to enhance our nature studies.

Geared toward 6th-8th graders, we received physical copies of the Reader, the Student Book, and the Teacher’s Guide with a PDF copy of the quizzes and tests. There are also two other books recommended to accompany this course that Memoria Press offers, the Peterson First Guide to Trees and The Tree Book for Kids and Their Grown-Ups. Both of these books would be excellent additions to your study of trees as a resource. The course contains 21 lessons broken up over five units of work cover the following topics:

The Root & Stem

Leaves

Flowers & Fruits

Observing Trees

Advanced work with Photosynthesis & Respiration

Completing any of the 21 lessons is easy to do with the help of the model lesson plan given in the front of the Student Book. The model lesson plan gives you review, reading questions, diagrams, and labeling, along with activities to complete.

For our family, we used this set during the morning with our girls. We took our time and worked through the lessons with a nice and slow pace by completing one lesson a week. There is plenty of material available to stretch the learning out to one lesson per week and still get a full course load. 

My girls enjoyed going for walks and keeping a nature journal, all the while discovering the nature in our neighborhood right around us including the trees in the forest down the street. Learning to identify the different types of leaves and trees of the forest was new and exciting for us. I especially enjoyed that the program is so thorough and draws different disciplines including comprehension and Latin into the program. 

If you are looking for a solid program in the study of trees or nature, then this is the curriculum for you. We have learned so much already and look forward to digging deeper into this amazing world right outside our four walls.

-Product review by Jacquelin Caffey The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, September 2017