Poetry Memorization {TOS Crew Review}

Have you ever tried to memorize something?  We recently received a review item through the TOS Crew from Institute for Excellence in Writing to help with poetry memorization and memorization in general.  Linguistic Development Through Poetry Memorization is an awesome curriculum that we were sent to review.  And let me tell you it includes a lot of material!  But, in addition to what it comes with we also got a physical copy of the Student Book which doesn’t normally come with this kit as it comes with a downloadable and printable for families student book.  

Poetry memorization was never something that struck me when I thought about linguistic development.  I never connected the two in my mind until I saw this review come up on our Crew forum.  Seeing that I had to stop and think.  How could they be connected?  Could one really influence the other?  And the answer came to me.  IEW(Institute for Excellence in Writing) has a capital idea!  It makes a lot of sense for poetry memorization to be combined with Linguistic development.  For that matter, any memorization could be used for this but poetry fits very well.

The kit we received is titled Linguistic Development Through Poetry Memorization.  As I mentioned above, we received a physical copy of the student book with our review but this is not something included in the kit so if you were to buy it you would get the downloadable student book.  

What else is included in this kit you might ask.  Well let me enlighten you!  It’s a lot of wonderful things!  You receive a physical Teacher’s Manual.  With that come a set of CD’s and 7 MP3 downloads.  The set you would purchase also has the downloadable student book.  Plus, included with the set is a bonus DVD of Andrew Pudewa’s conference talk titled “Nurturing Component Communicators”.

The kit retails for $65 currently while purchasing the physical student book like we received would be an additional $19.  Something I really love about IEW is that they offer products that you can use with a broad range of ages.  This particular product states that you can use it for all ages really (K-12 as well as special education) and included different levels within the curriculum so you can decide where your student fits and what level to start them out at.  Plus of course it has some wonderful poetry that you and your children are going to love reading and memorizing, or at least we did!

There are 5 CD’s within the CD set I received.  Each CD corresponds to a level as I was talking about above where you can use this curriculum with all ages.  So, you receive a CD for each level and there are 5 levels for you to choose from as to where to put your child first.  Also in this wonderful leather case that houses the CD’s(totally in love with the case guys it’s gorgeous) is the DVD that was mentioned above of a conference talk by Andrew Pudewa titled “Nurturing Component Communicators”.  

For the MP3 downloads, you receive 7.  They are:

• Nurturing Competent Communicators
• Mastery Learning, Ability Development, and Individualized Education
• Ten Thousand Times and Then Begins Understanding
• On Listening
• On Speaking
• On Reading
• On Writing

You get specific instructions on how to download the MP3 files which was very helpful to me because I really am not that familiar with them.  The other download available when you get in there will be the student e-book.  IEW has a wonderful family policy which allows you to print the e-book as many times as needed for your immediate family.  So I could print off a student book for each of my own children without having to pay any other fees.  These guys are very generous!!

This course that includes Poetry Memorization is a mastery learning approach which means that your child will be expected to master each of the lessons or steps.  I love that not only is my child memorizing wonderful works of poetry, but she is also learning some new words and what they mean.  Once you learn a word it is stored in your brain forever and you can pull it out to use it.  There was  a quote in the teacher’s book on the introduction page about how you can’t get something out of your child’s brain that isn’t there to begin with.  I find this to be true and really want to introduce lots of new words and ideas to my children plus the classical literature that poetry brings.

There are four pillars to the Mastery Learning process used by the writers of our book. 

1. The Earliest Period
2. The Best Teacher
3. The Best Environment
4. The Best Method of Learning

The Teacher’s book goes more in-depth into these, but they were definitely something that made me think and reevaluate some of how I had been teaching my children.

As I mentioned before there are five levels of memorization in the book.  Level One is the lower level.  Each level one through four contains 20 poems for your child to learn while Level Five contains speeches.  We have not made it to level five so I really can’t tell you too much there, but I can say that using the lower levels is definitely building your student up to be able to memorize those long speeches and making it easier.

The CD’s have audio recordings of each of the poems.  Each CD is one level so you will have the 20 poems to be memorized in level one on CD one.  This makes a great way to listen to them in the car while driving.  Hearing something repeated is a great way to help familiarize yourself with something and helps to make the memorization easier without your child really even thinking about it.  Think of all the songs you’ve memorized just because you’ve heard them played over and over on the radio.  It’s the same principle here.

As you would imagine, your child starts off with simple easy poems in the level one.  Four and five lines are the first two poems.  Rhyme and rhythm also work well for memorizing them in these lower levels.  I did make my big kids start with these poems the same as my younger children.  By big kids I’m saying fourth grade ages 11 and 9 and by younger children I’m meaning my 5 year olds.  Now, my three-year old was also listening and learning and can recite some of these simple poems too even though I did not specifically work with her on them. 

In the student book there are also pictures with each poem that your child can color.  Having that mental image can also be helpful to learning.  If they stumble I’ll ask them what the picture they remember going with that poem looked like.  For instance, poem three of level one has a picture of a boy or man sitting on the stairs.  That is a good key to the poem which is The Little Man Who Wasn’t There, and they could then go oh yeah I remember.  And of course that remembering really made them happy which in turn made me love that they were learning but also that they were excited that they had learned.

Poetry memorization can be painless and IEW has created a great course for this painless memorization with their Linguistic Development Through Poetry Memorization.  It’s amazing how words my children didn’t know when we started learning a new poem, words we’d have to look up and define, are now part of their everyday vocabulary now.  I highly recommend this to all my fellow homeschoolers.

Ready to learn more?  Check out all the other Crew reviews(we all received the same product) over on the Main TOS Crew blog.  You can also check out Institute for Excellence in Writing on their Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube.