Review of Memoria Press StoryTime Treasures Literary Guide

We love classic books at our house. In fact, we have an overwhelming number of books that have required us to keep building bookshelf after bookshelf. We were so excited to see some of the early readers that we love the most be put to good use with the chance to review StoryTime Treasures Student Guide and Answer Key, a literary guide for many of our beloved titles, available from Memoria Press!



We were able to get through two of the books that the guide covers during our review time. I chose Blueberries for Sal, and Caps for Sale. Both were favorites that my older children had read, but we had never done a formal literary guide or lesson plan for.



(Note that you can choose to order just the guide, as we reviewed, get the literary titles separately -- if you find you need extra copies -- or as part of a complete set with the guide. If you are like us, and have many of the books at home already, it's nice to have flexible purchasing options!)



First, my son is a struggling reader who needed some help to get through the books. We knew that he would, so I really appreciated that the lessons in the activity book are broken into manageable chunks. We covered each book over a period of a couple of weeks, and it gave him lots of time to work through things at a challenging, yet comfortable pace.

The activities included in the book are things I would want to see from a 1st grade curriculum. For Blueberries for Sal, for example, we covered the following:
  • vocabulary words
  • handwriting
  • basic sentence structure
  • reading comprehension
  • grammar and mechanics (quotations marks and onomatopoeia)
  • science (hibernation)
We also got through Caps for Sale, which covered much of the language, vocab, and comprehension you would expect, plus some math, verb and tense usage, and emotions words.



Other books covered in the guide include:

  • Little Bear, where kids will review weather appropriate clothing, capitalization, and chronology of events.
  • Little Bear's Visit, where children will verbs, directional words, adjectives, imagination, and story elements (table of contents, characters, and setting.)
  • Make Way for Ducklings, where students can discover abbreviations, rhyming words, and illustration.

For such a thin book (it has 80 pages), the student activities were very dense in what they covered. I was really impressed that it offered such a well-rounded way of using literature to cover so many subject areas!

The teacher's book is small, just 24 pages, but that's because most of the work is having the kids write and explain things in their own words. The few things that would require concrete answers are very basic math problems, etc. I would recommend the teacher's book as a nice way to check answers, but we didn't use it on many days that my son was just answering questions.

This set is just another reason why we've come to really enjoy Memoria Press for our children over the years. You can see what else they are up to via their Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and G+! See their website here.

Comments