As a homeschooling mom of four, I love finding a curriculum appropriate for a wide range of learners. Eileen Chevalier's Typewriter Aalphabet Botany Curriculum provided our whole family with a beautiful resource for exploring numbers, letters, and botany! This curriculum includes a set of beautifully illustrated letter and number flashcards. Each card displays either a letter (upper and lowercase) or a number (0-9). The letter cards include the name and description of a plant, while the number cards focus on different plant parts. In addition to the flashcards, there are thirty-six coloring pages and detailed lesson guides for you to download, print, and enjoy with your children. The lesson guides cover a broad spectrum of botany topics, including classification, identification, photosynthesis, life cycle, and so much more! This curriculum is available at www.docetdocent.com. The box of flashcards is $36.00, and the coloring pages and lesson guides are available for download for $10.00 each. Additionally, there are free lesson guides on the Docet Docent website that you can use to guide you through all thirty-six lessons!

This year, our family is focusing on biology for our science lessons. The Typewriter Aalphabet Botany Curriculum fit in seamlessly with our regular day and was the perfect way to dive a bit deeper into the study of living things. I used various parts of this curriculum with all three of my school-aged children (preschool, early elementary, and upper elementary levels). Each of the thirty-six lesson guides has a focus for the day, a reading suggestion (you can find the books at your local library), vocabulary words with definitions, an investigation activity, and a journaling prompt. The lesson guides were simple for me to implement and were age-appropriate for my nine and ten-year-old children. My four-year-old very much enjoyed reviewing her letters using the flashcards and working on the coloring sheets while her older siblings worked on the investigation activities. I have been introducing two new letters to my youngest each week, so any time we began working on a new letter- we would pull out that flashcard and, as a family, read about the plant shown on that card. We also enjoyed pulling out all the flashcards, singing the ABC's and putting them in the correct order as we sang. We all created our own "nature journals" for the journaling prompt and filled them with our notes, observations, and pressed flowers and leaves that we found on our nature walks! The Docet Docent website also provides fantastic lesson videos that take you through each lesson guide. Sometimes my older children would watch this video to help guide them through the lesson if my youngest (6 months) needed more of my attention that day- which was helpful! 

We genuinely enjoyed learning about botany with Eileen Chevalier's Typewriter Aalphabet Botany Curriculum. I enjoyed the flexible nature and simplicity of executing each day's lesson. I have been known to get overwhelmed with new curriculum and throw too much at my kids at once- but these lesson guides were so well-done that it was easy for all of us to learn and enjoy! This curriculum embraces natural curiosity by asking questions and encouraging the child to investigate to make new discoveries. It is thorough, thought-provoking, and very well-written. The alphabet flashcards came packaged beautifully in a sturdy box and are so visually appealing that they make a great decoration for our school room walls! In the future, I would love to see the coloring pages and lesson guides also offered in print form, perhaps bound into a booklet! I am a very hands-on person, so the digital version was not my first choice. However, it was straightforward to download and print the files at home. I appreciated that the guides were written in black ink, so it was easy on my printing budget! 

Eileen Chevalier's Typewriter Alphabet Botany Curriculum is an excellent addition to any homeschooling classroom. I would absolutely recommend these resources to anyone that wants to learn more about God's beautiful creation. For those families that participate in Classical Conversations (as we do), this is a great companion to Cycle 1! The Docet Docent website includes an entire video explaining how the lessons match up. There are so many opportunities to ask questions, discuss the life all around us, and get out in nature together! If you are a homeschooling mama of multiple age groups, this is a great one for gathering everyone around the table and learning together! 

-Product review by Danielle Lenz, The Old Schoolhouse^®, October 2021